


doesn't matter if we've gone too far

by ORiley42



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Hospital Sex, Identity Porn, M/M, foggy makes questionable decisions, nurse!frank
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 18:13:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7768120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ORiley42/pseuds/ORiley42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Early S2 AU where Foggy gets shot and ends up in the hospital, where he meets a slightly suspicious and very hot nurse named Frank.</p>
            </blockquote>





	doesn't matter if we've gone too far

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [A Dog's Life](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7653748) by [ornategrip](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ornategrip/pseuds/ornategrip). 
  * Inspired by [Frank/Foggy](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/221584) by iraya. 



> I’ve decided to place equal blame on iraya and their epic frankfoggy fanart, and on ornategrip and their fantastic frankfoggy fic for inspiring this fic. *shakes fist* curse ye for dragging me onto this blasted tugboat of a ship! 
> 
> This was originally just gonna be cheeky and fluffy and then… it got very sad… it’s all Frank’s fault…  
> I think this is the first thing I’ve ever posted that doesn’t have a happy ending. Apologies.  
> (TW for a very brief mention of suicide.)  
> (Title from Imagine Dragon's "Who We Are")

 

So, Foggy got shot. Clipped really, as he insisted to Matt who was clearly going into cardiac arrest on the other side of the phone when Foggy called to tell him (because he was a _good_ friend, who _informed_ his partner when he’d been grievously wounded, rather than collapsing in his living room to possibly be stumbled upon before he bled out).

“I, I gotta go, buddy,” Foggy slurred slightly, “the ambulance lady – person? Doctor? I dunno, they’re tellin’ me to hang up, so bye-bye! Tell Karen I’m alive, please.” Foggy heard a vague sound of distress before he clicked the end call button and the emergency worker plucked the phone from his hands. Things got a little fuzzy after that (blood loss, he was told), and then _very_ sharp (getting patched up – it _hurt_ ), and then pleasantly blurry again (pain meds – god bless.)

When he woke up properly, two very attractive, very worried people were sitting next to his bed murmuring quietly to each other. It took him a moment to place them, but when he did, he was filled with a rush of joy because – hurray! Friends! And also because, _wow_ , did he have some good-looking friends (that might have been the morphine talking.) 

“Foggy!” Matt’s voice was strained as he leaned forward, apparently having used his super-secret ninja powers to divine that Foggy was awake, even though he’d only just barely dragged his bleary eyes open.

“Heyyy,” he managed to reply, his hand flopping out in Matt’s direction. Matt took it, a small smile warring with the frown currently decorating his face.

“Hey you,” Karen added softly, leaning in next to Matt and patting Foggy’s fingers where they were curled around Matt’s palm.

“Oh no, only one hand, but two pretty people,” Foggy noted with dismay before realizing, “Wait! I have two hands!” He tried to move his other arm which – terrible plan. Really, an even worse plan than the one that had got him shot.

Karen hissed at the jarring movement, and Matt went a shade paler.

“Foggy. What. Were. You. _Thinking_.” Matt bit the words out with more savagery than Foggy thought was necessary considering that he was still basically in one piece (unlike a certain reckless vigilante he knew). 

“No, no,” Foggy tried to argue, shaking his head weakly, “bullet wound means no lectures.”

“Uh, wrong,” Matt shot back, tone clipped, “I think bullet wound _equals_ lectures.”

“ _Karen_ ,” Foggy whined, throwing his most pitiful pout in her direction. 

“Matt’s right Foggy, what were you _doing_? Busting into a Dogs of Hell bar, what did you think was gonna happen?”

“I didn’t bust in! I walked in, like a totally normal dude. I just wanted to see Smitty!”

“Who—who’s _Smitty_?” Matt demanded to know, rolling the name around in his mouth like it was something distasteful.

“Well, a dead guy, it turns out. Before he was dead, though, we went to school together. I thought he could give me some intel on the new bad guys in Hell’s Kitchen but, well. Dead. And. Turns out his friends are kinda mean. And I have a big mouth. So, you know, two plus two equals shots fired.”

Foggy giggled at his little joke and Matt’s head fell into his hands, while Karen pursed her lips. Even though Foggy was _pretty sure_ they were angrier at the people who’d shot him, rather than at him for getting shot, he still felt the need to protest, “Hey! It wasn’t _my_ fault, they were still all rattled about the Irish!”

Matt’s head shot up. “The Dogs were worried about the Irish?”

“Well, yeah, when half your rival gang gets blown away in one night, you take notice. Especially when you weren’t the ones doing it.”

“You’re sure? The Dogs weren’t part of this?”

“Uh, pretty sure. Not positive, because, you know. Shot.”

Matt breathed in deeply through his nose, a little behavioral tic Foggy had recently realized was a sign of Matt reining in his white hot temper. Foggy decided to be gratified that getting himself shot merited that kind of anger. It was flattering, in a vaguely creepy sort of way.

“We’ll figure out what’s going on, Foggy, I promise,” Matt gave Foggy’s hand a very final kind of squeeze that was equal parts comforting and alarming.

“I’m sure you will,” Foggy agreed, hoping he succeeded in keeping the resigned heartache out of his voice. Honestly, he’d be happier if his friends stayed right where they were, safe and sound with him, rather than run right into the face of danger. But, that wasn’t who they were. Matt was, well, _Matt_ , and Karen had wild investigative reporter genes that had been surfacing with a vengeance ever since Ben’s untimely passing, and Foggy just didn’t have the heart to get in their way. The best he could do for now was try and be there to pick up the pieces if they broke themselves apart.

So, with as much cheer as he was able to muster without it being patently false, Foggy assured his friends that he was feeling alright, really, and he’d mostly be sleeping for the next day or so anyway, so if they needed to leave and go _do things_ (read: vigilantism and questionably ethical journalism) he’d be just fine and dandy on his own.

He was a very good liar, or perhaps Matt and Karen simply couldn’t stand being cooped up any longer when there were hot leads to be chased, because in the space of a minute his two best friends had cleared out to pursue justice for his injury, leaving him sitting alone in a dark hospital room feeling achy and spacey and lonely.

Three floors below Foggy, Claire Temple clicked through the combination on her locker, pulling the door open and reaching inside to root around for her Tylenol. It had been one of those nights _before_ Matt Murdock had shown up in a storm of righteous fury, taking her firmly aside and wringing a promise out of her that she would keep an eye on his best friend, who’d just been put into recovery with a bullet hole through his shoulder.

As she tossed back a dose, she caught sight of a familiar figure that she hadn’t seen around for some time.

“Hey, Castle!” A tall man with dark hair and darker eyes turned towards Claire’s hail, a nametag reading “Frank” glinting off his dark blue scrubs.

“Temple,” he grunted in reply, going to his own locker.

“I haven’t seen you…” Claire rethought what she was going to say mid-sentence because ‘I haven’t seen you since your wife and children were killed and you almost died yourself’ was no way to greet a colleague returning from trauma leave. “I didn’t expect to see you around,” she amended, wincing slightly. There was just no good way for this conversation to go.

“I didn’t expect to see me around here either,” Frank admitted, rather shortly.

“But…?” Claire prompted, her curiosity overriding her politeness.

“But…” Frank shot an appraising sort of look in her direction, “I thought I could come back for a while, maybe do some good.”

Claire nodded. “We sure could use all hands on deck what with the gang-on-gang violence exploding out there.”

Frank snorted, “Oh yeah, patching up scumbags, that’s what drew me back in.”

“Scumbags or not, they still deserve our help.”

Frank made a non-committal noise, and Claire squinted a little suspiciously in his direction. She remembered how when she’d first met him, she’d thought Castle didn’t have the right kind of personality for medicine. Watching his sullen frame stomping around the ER, she couldn’t imagine what possessed him to use his GI Bill benefits to earn a nursing degree. But, she’d revised her opinion when she saw the wonders he worked with patients who thought of themselves as tough guys – cops who’d taken a bullet on the job and thought going to physical therapy would make them weak somehow, motorcyclists who didn’t want to accept that after they’d torn half their face off in a fiery crash they should probably rethink some of their life choices, and of course, fellow veterans. There was a time when all military and ex-military people who came in their hospital’s doors were sent straight to Frank. That was before, of course. Before Frank lost everything, spent months in a coma, woke up, and then fell off the map for weeks.

“So, where’ve you been?” Claire asked offhandedly, stowing her meds and shutting her locker.

“Around,” Frank answered, with a rather ominous lack of specificity.

Claire’s self-preservation instincts sent up a flare at the back of her mind, and she decided to move on. “Where’re you assigned this shift?”

“Recovery, A wing.”

“Huh. Speaking of the gangs, there’s a guy in the B wing, Foggy Nelson. Just a normal guy, a lawyer actually, but a friend of a friend. He managed to get shot by the Dogs of Hell.”

“The Dogs? What’d a lawyer want with those assholes.”

“He was investigating that crazy massacre of the Kitchen Irish.”

The line of Frank’s shoulders stiffened for a moment, before he visibly forced them to relax. “Does your guy have a habit of sticking his nose into nests of trigger-happy criminals?”

“Well, I don’t know much about him, but our mutual friend? Yeah. Kinda. He’s a good guy, and I think his friend is too, so, I promised to check in on him.”

“Well…” Frank trailed off before really saying anything, his eyes skating just away from Claire’s. “If you wanted, I could look in on him, for you.”

Part of her irrationally wanted to warn him away from Nelson, because Castle was giving off all kinds of jittery vibes that rubbed her the wrong way, but…it’s not like it could hurt. He was going to be on that floor anyway, and it’s not like it would stop Claire from looking in on Matt’s friend too, so…

“Yeah. That would be great. Thank you.”

“No problem. Any enemy of the Dogs is a friend of mine.”

And with that not-particularly-reassuring statement, Castle swung around a corner and disappeared into the shadows with nary the sound of a footfall, leaving Claire with the distinct feeling that something, for someone, wasn’t going to end well.

~~~~~

“Hey.”

Foggy glanced up at the greeting, accompanied by a rap of knuckles on the doorframe. He’d been very preoccupied with staring at a scratch in the opposite wall and feeling sorry for himself and the state of his life, and decided to blame this distracted state for why, upon turning to see who was speaking, his mouth just sort of fell open and didn’t bother to make any noises recognizable as human language.

The very attractive (Foggy would like to place special emphasis on the _very_ ) man standing in Foggy’s doorway apparently took his wordless gaping as an invitation, striding into the room and picking up the clipboard hanging from the end of his bed, giving it a cursory glance.

“I’m still pretty high on painkillers, honestly,” Foggy finally opened with, in a rather premature attempt to explain his blatant staring. The words were well out of his mouth before he realized he probably should have prefaced them with something, _anything_.

An amused expression flitted across the nurse’s face before it returned to its previous stoic state. “Yeah, even if I didn’t have your chart in front of me, I think I would’ve figured that out.”

There was a distinctly entertained note underlying the man’s tone, and Foggy relaxed minutely. Entertained. He could work with that. “Speaking of, are you here to give me more drugs, or take them away, because I gotta say, my opinion of you does rest on how you answer that question.”

The nurse actually smiled at that before he replied, “Neither. I’m just checking in on you for a friend. She said that you two had a mutual acquaintance…”

Foggy blinked for a minute, wondering who the unfairly good-looking nurse could be talking about, before he realized, “Hottie McBurner Phone.”

“Sorry?”

“Huh? No, just…inside joke, I…never mind.” Foggy decided to change tack, and held out a hand (taking a moment to check that it was the one not being held down by a sling). “I’m Foggy Nelson, it’s nice to meet you.”

“Frank Castle, and it’s, uh, nice to meet you too.” Frank shook the proffered hand and shuffled a little awkwardly. Foggy wondered why he seemed so uncomfortable with such a run-of-the-mill kind of social interaction. Was he always so….standoffish? Was Foggy being super weird somehow? Didn’t being a nurse require a certain level of comfort with, well, people?

And because his mouth and brain had apparently been disconnected by the bullet to his shoulder, Foggy found himself voicing those thoughts, saying, “You seem a little…” Foggy’s eyes dragged along the thick muscles showing even under those loose scrubs, over Frank’s broad shoulders and up to his high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, “…scary, to be a nurse.”

Without missing a beat, Frank shot back, “Yeah, well, you look a little soft to be buddies with a bunch of gangbangers.”

“Who, me? No, no, no, I just went to kindergarten with a gangbanger. Well, biker.”

Frank glanced up from the clipboard at Foggy, showing the first real signs of interest since he’d entered the room.

“See,” Foggy shuffled a little more upright as he launched into an explanation, “Me and Smitty were friends when we were kids. Well, we were friend _ly_. We were acquaintances.”

“Mmhmm.”

“So, when I hear some guys blew away a whole barful of Irish, I think, hey, maybe my pal in one of Hell’s Kitchen’s _other_ most notorious gangs has some information.”

“And you thought that because when you were in diapers, you were friends – sorry, _friendly_ – with this guy, he’d just…tell you everything you needed to know?”

“Um…basically. Saying it that way, now, it seems much clearer that this plan lacked a certain amount of logic.”

“Yeah.”

“It didn’t help that Smitty had been mowed down on I-90 not too long ago.”

Frank’s head jerked up fractionally, his eyes flashing before he seemed to tamp down on his reaction. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other and let out a low whistle. “No, I don’t imagine that helped much. Did you manage to learn anything before you got ventilated?”

Foggy blew out a sigh and sank back on his pillows. “No, not really. Mostly just that the Irish might not have been the first gang to get hit. It sounded like some sort of army took down Smitty and some of his friends, I’m not sure…that’s about when the bikers decided they’d had enough of my big mouth and started making serious with the guns…”

Frank’s eyebrows pulled together and he began, “Mr. Nelson…”

“It’s Foggy,” he cut Frank off with a small smile. “Or, you know, you can call me Foggy. Everyone who’s seen me without my pants gets to call me Foggy.” Frank’s raised eyebrows at that statement just spurred Foggy to babble on, “not that, I mean – these hospital gown thingys are basically dresses, except not even, because dresses go all the way around, so this doesn’t really qualify, but there _definitely_ aren’t any pants involved in this ensemble, though, of course, most of the time when I’m pantsless, it’s not in the hospital, it’s for…other…reasons…Anyway!” Foggy shifted gears when he realized that he may not be able to stop himself from talking, but at least he could steer his babbling towards less embarrassing topics. “Bikers! Getting shot! It was all very fun.”

Thankfully, Frank seemed amenable to pretending Foggy’s pants-rant didn’t happen, as he asked, “Temple said something about you bein’ a lawyer? Is getting shot at by bikers all in a day’s work for you?”

“Ha. Yeah. Well. I didn’t plan on it being that way, but ever since that whole thing with, you know, dismantling Wilson Fisk’s criminal empire…” Foggy waved a hand carelessly, like taking down crime bosses was just a trifling matter.

“Wait, that was _your_ firm? You took down Fisk?” Frank looked a little suspicious, but also impressed, and Foggy tried not to puff up his chest because a) that would be a tad arrogant and b) it would pull his stitches and hurt like hell.

“Yup. Nelson and Murdock, that’s us. We may be small, but we’re spunky!”

“Huh.” Frank’s lips twitched into a slanted sort of expression that Foggy couldn’t quite categorize as a smile, because he was pretty sure smiles weren’t supposed to be that dark. “From everything I read in the papers, Fisk was a grade-A shitbag so, thanks. Sounds like you did the city a real service.”

“Oh, I mean…” Foggy shook his head, waving his one functional arm, “my partner can probably take more of the credit…”

“Hmm. Modest,” Frank nodded approvingly, “I like that in a man.”

There was a moment of silence, and then an increasingly aggressive beeping noise, and it wasn’t _Foggy’s_ fault that he was hooked up to a heart monitor, and it’s not like he could _control_ his pulse when the mega-hot nurse said something as suggestive as “I like that in a man” using that deep, gravelly, voice of his…

“Uh…this heart monitor is speaking out of turn,” Foggy pointed an accusing finger at the machine while Frank chuckled and hooked Foggy’s chart back on the end of Foggy’s bed, “I ask for its testimony to be stricken from the record.”

“Don’t sweat it, gorgeous,” Frank threw a smirk in Foggy’s direction before he disappeared back out the door, like some sort of rugged, hot, broken-nosed apparition. 

The heart monitor continued to beep its displeasure, but Foggy took no real notice of it because…did Frank just call him _gorgeous_? That was….well, it was honestly a bit extreme. And possibly unethical, since, as a nurse, Frank knew full well that Foggy was physically weak and it couldn’t _possibly_ be morally acceptable to put such unnecessary strain on the heart of a man who’d just been shot.

Marci, he realized. That’s who Foggy needed to talk to. He reached over with as much speed as his drugged and wounded body could muster to grab his phone and type out a quick message: _Nurse is very hot. Help me._

In under a minute he had a reply: _I could strangle you with those awful polyester hospital sheets so they have to give you the kiss of life?_

Foggy typed back: _Not exactly what I meant, but you know me, I’m down for anything._

_I’ve got a thing tonight, but I can stop by for a quick rescue tomorrow morning. Can you hold on till then?_

_I’ll do my best._

~~~~~

A little after ten the next morning, Marci flounced in on a cloud of perfume and confidence. “So, I was going to get you a really cute little customized bear,” she announced, pulling a glass bottle of expensive-looking alcohol from her purse, “but you have to put an order in a week in advance, so, no Foggy Bear for you.” She tossed a look down at Foggy that was somehow imperious and affectionate at the same time. “Couldn’t you have gotten shot with a little more advance notice?”

“Sorry, Marci. I’ll try to give you more warning the next time I take a bullet.”

“That’d be great, thanks,” she purred, twisting the top off the booze and taking a sip before handing it off to Foggy, who tucked it safely into a drawer next to his bed. There was still enough morphine in his system that he probably shouldn’t add alcohol to the mix.

“So, spill.” Marci settled herself elegantly in the uncomfortable plastic chair next to Foggy’s bed. “Hot nurse. Details.”

“Frank. Very manly. Very hot. Kinda frightening.”

“Well, he sounds right up your alley.”

“I know, it’s a problem.”

Marci pulled out her phone and glanced at him expectantly. “You got a last name?”

“Um…” Foggy closed his eyes, trying to remember and failing, since apparently his brain had replaced that information with images of what Frank’s ass looked like as he left Foggy’s room. “Nope.”

Marci rolled her eyes and tucked her phone back in her purse. “Well, even Google needs more than one of the most common names in America to work its magic. I guess we’re flying blind on this one.”

“Uh huh.”

“For all you know, he could be a serial killer in his spare time.”

Foggy winced as the darkness he’d seen lingering behind Frank’s eyes the other day came to mind.

Marci caught his movement and leaned forward in her chair, hand coming forward to grab Foggy’s wrist. “Oh my god, you don’t think he’s _actually_ a serial killer, do you?”

“No? No! Probably not.”

“ _Probably_?” Marci’s eyebrows flew up to comic heights.

“Definitely probably.”

“ _Franklin_ –”

“Yeah, I know, the fact that I am not 1000% percent sure that Frank isn’t a crazed murderer is probably a huge red flag, but –”

“ _But_?” Marci crossed her arms firmly. “This better be a hell of a ‘but’.”

“Well,” Foggy smirked, “ _his_ is –”

Marci held up one perfectly manicured finger. “No. You answer me this. Do you know where you are?”

“Uh…”

“Do you know _why_ you’re where you are?”

“Um…”

“Because you did some really dumb shit, Foggy bear.”

“Gee, thanks?”

“Now, don’t think that I _really_ care or anything, because I’m not a total sap like you. However,” she held up another finger to quell Foggy’s laugh of disbelief, “I do care a _little_. And you are usually a sort of decent judge of character, present company excluded. And if you think this guy is shady – the smart choice would be to steer clear.”

“Well, maybe I’m not in the mood to be making smart choices right now,” Foggy retorted, wishing the words didn’t come out sounding so petulant.

“I think the bullet hole in your shoulder speaks to that,” Marci replied primly.

Foggy grumbled something indistinct before saying more loudly, “If I wanted healthy advice and lectures on morality, I would have texted Karen and Matt.”

Marci huffed and flipped her hair over her shoulder. “Fine. We can return to my regularly scheduled cold bitch act in a minute, after you promise me one thing.”

“What’s that?”

She took his hand in both of hers and looked him dead in the eyes. “I want you to promise me that if you get into anything bad, whether with the sexy nurse, or with more bikers, or _anything_ that’s likely to send you back to this hospital, or the _morgue_ – that you’ll get out.”

Foggy swallowed heavily as images of Matt lying bloody on the floor, of Karen’s face when she saw Matt’s fresh bruises and tried not to say anything about it, of bloodied criminals taken down by the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, paraded through his mind. 

Did it count as lying if he was _already_ involved with something bad? Deep down, he knew that it absolutely did, but on the surface, he pasted on the most convincing smile he could dig up and squeezed Marci’s hands. “C’mon, Marci, you know me. I’ll be _fine_.” Marci dropped his hand, her expression making clear that she didn’t believe his breezy attitude for a second, but that she was willing to let it go. For now.

“Well then, let’s move on to more important matters, like _my_ love life.” Marci leaned back in her chair, crossing her legs. “You’re not the only one who’s spotted some prime ass this week…”

For the next hour, Foggy was regaled with every last detail about Marci’s latest conquest: Jack, 31, Sagittarius, ENTJ, worked at the PR firm next to her new law office, and was possessed of not only an incredible ass but some astonishing thighs that Foggy was convinced were photoshopped when Marci pulled out her phone to show him visual proof. If it weren’t for the bullet hole aching in his shoulder and the sharp smell of antiseptic burning his nose, this would actually be one of the best mornings he’d had in a while – it was nice to get to relax and chat about innocuous things for once. Teasing Marci about her wild sexcapades certainly led to fewer shouting matches than trying to take on Matt’s martyr complex. But, maybe he was just used to a certain level of angst in his life, because even as he laughed with Marci, he found himself feeling a little off-balance, like something was missing.

It seemed appropriate, then, that no sooner had the thought crossed his mind than his favorite dark and mysterious nurse peered around the doorframe.

“ ’M I interrupting?” Frank grunted as he laid eyes on Marci.

“No!” Foggy answered way too quickly, causing Marci to roll her eyes hugely. “Marci was just leaving,” Foggy added pointedly. Marci’s expression turned acidic, but she gathered up her purse with a neat sweep of her hand, and Foggy knew she understood.

“That’s right, I was. I’ll see you around Foggy Bear,” she purred, leaning down to lay a smacking kiss on his forehead before sauntering away. She paused pointedly as she passed Frank, turning back and dragging her gaze up and down his body with a complete lack of subtlety, even going so far as to nod approvingly to Foggy.

Frank seemed to take it in stride, glancing back over his shoulder at her, expression unfazed as Marci finally swung around the corner and out of sight.

“Did your friend just _openly_ check out my ass?” Frank asked casually, going to look at Foggy’s chart and appearing completely unbothered. 

“ _What_? No. That would be…I mean…” Frank flicked his eyes up from the clipboard to pin Foggy with a look of disbelief, which he wilted under almost immediately.

“Well, okay, yes,” he admitted to the ceiling, unable to hold Frank’s gaze, “But to be fair, it _is_ an ass worth checking out…” He winced even as the words came out of his mouth. Maybe if he stared at the ceiling hard enough he’d spontaneously develop laser vision, and it would collapse and put him out of his misery.

“So, she’s not your girlfriend, then?” Frank’s tone as he asked that question sounded more amused than offended, so Foggy chanced a glance in his direction. Sure enough, a grin was tugging at the corner of Frank’s mouth, though he was visibly trying to repress it.

Foggy took that as a sign that the handsome nurse wasn’t going to sue him for sexual harassment (or strangle him with his IV) and opened his mouth to reply, whereupon he found that even _more_ inappropriate words apparently had just been waiting for a chance to tumble out of it.

“No. No! Well, no, _ex_ -girlfriend, actually. But a friend now! Just a friend, if that matters. A pretty good one too, once you get past her façade of narcissism. Not that all my friends are my exes! I have non-ex-friends. And exes who aren’t friends. And ex-boyfriends. Not a ton, but, I do have them, ex-boyfriends, that is. Which is an entirely irrelevant fact! Obviously! But, as a lawyer, I am a master of many irrelevant facts, and sometimes they just, you know, spill forth. Uncontrollably.”

Frank’s bark of laughter at that last bit was probably the only thing that gave Foggy the sense to slam his mouth shut. He wondered if he could get Matt’s sympathetic nurse friend to sew his mouth closed, for his own sake and the sake of others.

“Y’know, when I left yesterday,” Frank crossed his arms and settled his weight against the side of Foggy’s bed, “I wondered if I’d been imagining how many different ways you were able to put your foot in your mouth, and in such quick succession.”

Foggy sighed and closed his eyes, hoping that if Frank was secretly a serial killer, maybe he’d have mercy on Foggy and give him a swift death before he said anything else too embarrassing to contemplate. “It’s not usually this bad. I blame the pain meds. Sorry.”

“Don’t be, it’s kinda…” Frank shrugged, casting around for the right word, “…cute.”

“Cute! Ok. I can do cute. I…” Foggy cut his next words off, not even sure what they were, just that he probably shouldn’t say them. “I think I’m gonna shut my mouth now,” he resolved, before doing just that.

“Aw, that’s too bad, because I kinda need your mouth right now…”

Foggy blinked. Was his terrible, drug-induced habit of making everything sound like a double-entendre contagious?

“To take your temperature?” Frank clarified with a shadow of a smirk, after watching Foggy gape for a minute.

“Of…of course…” Foggy was proud that he managed to choke those words out without adding anything like ‘you can have my mouth anytime.’

Frank produced a thermometer from the stand next to the IV, clicking a disposable tip onto it before reaching for Foggy’s jaw and settling the slim bit of plastic under his tongue. His hand lingered near Foggy’s cheek as he waited for the thermometer to beep, and he was now very distinctly in Foggy’s personal space and _wow_ did this guy give off some heat, imagine cuddling up to _that_ on a cold winter’s night…

Abort! Abort! Abort train of thought! Foggy’s mind shrieked. If his mouth wasn’t otherwise occupied, he’d probably already be saying something dreadfully inappropriate.

“There we go,” Frank took the thermometer back and held it up for inspection. “98.6, you’re good.”

He reached down to take Foggy’s wrist, fingers expertly finding his pulse as he glanced down at his watch. “So,” he began conversationally, “you heard anything more about the Dogs who shot you?”

Foggy grimaced, the question bringing to mind things he’d been doing his best to ignore. “Um…no. Not really. My partner and our legal secretary wanted to go after them, but our business is defense, not prosecution, so I told them to leave it to the police.”

“Hmm.” Frank’s lips pressed together in a tight line. “If they’d ripped a hole through me, I’d be a little more hungry for justice.”

“Revenge, you mean?” Foggy sighed, his thoughts rolling inevitably in Matt-related directions.

Frank’s eyes shot up to meet his, like Foggy’d touched a nerve. “You not a big fan of some good old fashioned revenge?” His tone was too overly casual for Foggy to mistake the question as offhand.

“I don’t….it’s not that I don’t _get_ it. Wanting revenge. Someone hurts you, you wanna hurt them. Someone breaks your heart, you wanna nuke theirs. But Gandhi was on to something when he said ‘an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.’”

Frank made a grumpy sort of noise and dropped Foggy’s wrist. “Pulse’s good.” He glanced back towards the door like he was thinking of leaving, but he turned back after a moment and added, “Peace and love have never really been my thing.”

Foggy cocked his head and squinted. “That is…slightly unnerving, coming from my nurse.”

“Yeah, well,” Frank pulled a metal chain up from under his scrubs, revealing a pair of dog tags, “vet, so…”

“Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean–”

Frank scuffed the sole of his shoe against the ground and looked away as he muttered, “No, it’s fine.”

It was obvious this was an uncomfortable conversation for Frank to have, but Foggy wasn’t exactly firing on all thrusters, and he quickly found himself asking, “I say this totally respectfully, but… Doesn’t it ever feel like a contradiction? Holding a gun in one hand and a bandage in the other?”

Frank shrugged, his eyes now focused on a point past Foggy’s bed, and Foggy got the feeling he was looking at something that wasn’t in that hospital room.

“Medicine ‘n mayhem have always worked together, sometimes a little more closely than people want to think about. In a way, they even can come from the same place – wanting to change the world, make it a better place to live in. I dunno.” Frank shook his head as if to clear it and finally looked back to meet Foggy’s eyes.

“So I guess you…” Foggy made a circling motion with his hand as he struggled to find the right words, “embody that paradox, sort of.”

Frank stared point blank at him, and Foggy sensed that he was being measured, judged. By virtue of his time in the courtroom, he managed to hold his ground, keeping his gaze steady and firm.

Whatever Frank saw in him must have been alright, because his dark expression lightened as he asked, “So, if you’re not into revenge…what do you think of the person – the people – who’ve been gunning down all these gangsters?”

Foggy considered the question. His instinct was simply ‘they’re monsters,’ but something told him that wasn’t the right answer. Not right for this particular conversation, but not in general either – after all, he’d thought the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen was a nutjob at first, too. (Admittedly, the jury was still out on that one.) He finally replied, delicately, “I’m hesitant to judge people I don’t know anything about.”

“C’mon, humor me,” Frank almost smiled as he leaned in closer, dark eyes glinting, and Foggy thought that right now, he’d be happy to humor Frank in just about any way he wanted. “What do you think about them, what they’re doing? Are they cleaning the streets up, or are they just…evil?”

 _That_ question, Foggy had considered all too many times, though with significantly fewer fatalities in the equation. Still… “I would concede that the law may not always be enough, but… I still like to think that there are better ways of dealing with the world’s problems that just killing everyone involved.”

Frank nodded slowly, setting his jaw as he angled himself away from Foggy. “Yeah,” he murmured, “I’d like to think that too.”

Foggy began to wonder very seriously what sort of minefield he’d wandered into with this guy, as he watched a bone-deep weariness settle over Frank and an unfathomable sort of sadness rise behind his eyes. But as quickly as that grief appeared, it vanished, hidden away behind Frank’s impenetrable steel gaze.

“I’m still doing my rounds in this wing, so, I should probably get moving…” Frank leaned towards the door but rocked back in Foggy’s direction, as if something in him was torn.

“In a hurry to go visit other attractive, lonely, bed-ridden patients?” Foggy teased, hoping his instinctive reaction to cover awkward and emotional moments with humor was appropriate, “Watch out, I might get jealous.”

“Aw, don’t worry…” Frank cracked a smile that seemed almost genuine as he walked backwards towards the door, “you’re still my favorite.” With that, he stepped neatly around the doorframe and out of sight.

Foggy tried to remember how to breathe normally because, wow. The almost instantaneous transition from darkly philosophical, haunted Frank to mysterious, flirty Frank was enough to give Foggy whiplash. Which one was the real Frank, or was that a nonsensical question? Was he both, or neither, something else entirely?

Foggy pondered those questions until Karen popped by for a surprise visit, during which he was treated to an excited burst of information and theories that he was simply too tired and too out of the loop to make sense of. But her company was appreciated anyway, so he nodded and smiled his way through several file folders worth of legal documents, and mostly just enjoyed watching Karen fill the room with light and passion, her golden hair swinging as she pointed out relevant details with enthusiastic jabs of her pen. Not long after Karen left to return to the office (with promises that she’d look after Matt since Foggy wasn’t there to do it), Foggy received a much more surprising visitor: Brett.

“What’re you doing here?” Foggy asked with equal parts suspicion and amusement, because Brett looked so uncomfortable it was hilarious, but him being here at all made Foggy apprehensive.

“I’m here to make sure you’re doing alright. At the behest of my mother,” he clarified, and Foggy nodded. Well, that explained it.

“Well, I’m doing just fine, all things considered. You can give Bess my best.”

“Alright. Should I give your partner, Murdock, my best too? Because he’s called me at least three times to badger me about your case.”

Foggy cringed a little at the thought, but couldn’t hide a smile. “Uh…sorry?”

“Oh, and Karen too. She’s been _texting_ me, and I can’t decide if that’s better or worse than calling me. I don’t even know how she got my number!”

Foggy was grinning openly now, as Brett continued to complain, “I’m not your personal pet policeman, I’ve got other cases to work, you know.”

“I know,” Foggy assured him with an unmistakably phony look of contrition, “I’ll pass it on, make sure they get the message.”

“Alright.” Brett nodded decisively, but his feet just sort of shuffled tentatively. Finally, he added, “Since I’m here, you need anything?”

“Aw, Brett, I didn’t know you cared…” Foggy teased, falling into their old rhythm of antagonism like slipping on a favorite old sweater.

“I _don’t_. I’m just trying to be decent.”

“Oh, well, in _that_ case, I wouldn’t mind a bit of good conversation…don’t know if there’s much you can do about that, though.”

“Hilarious, Nelson.”

“A compliment! Well, that’s as good a start as any.”

Brett grumbled and said something rude about Foggy’s profession, but he also ended up sitting in the chair at Foggy’s bedside, and they bickered away a good chunk of the afternoon. By the time Brett left with a final parting barb and eyeroll, Foggy was feeling more like his old self than he had since before he made the unfortunate decision to charge into that biker bar.

A lovely nurse with long dark hair and a stunning smile stuck her head in a little before dinner time, and it took Foggy a moment to place her as Matt’s mysterious nurse friend. They exchanged pleasantries, and traded comments about how it would be nice to meet up sometime when there was no blood or life-threatening injury involved. She was called away after only a few minutes, however, leaving Foggy feeling simultaneously very popular, and very lonely. So many visitors, but all gone in the end.

By the time the sun began to set, his temporarily buoyed attitude had begun to fade, even his naturally optimistic disposition unable to handle so many hours of lonely boredom and crap TV. As such, he considered it perfectly rational that, upon watching Frank’s now-familiar form materialize from the hallway and lean casually against the doorframe, it was like the whole world got a little brighter.

“Here to check my temperature, or has some other dashing patient stolen your heart already?” Foggy inquired with a cheeky grin.

Frank snorted and shook his head with what Foggy hoped was fondness. “Nah, my shift’s over. I just heard that a police officer came around today, and wanted to make sure everything was alright.”

Foggy’s smile grew, and he hoped he wasn’t crazy when he thought that that sounded like a pretty thinly veiled excuse for Frank to stop by and see him. “It wasn’t an official visit, I’m fine. That was just an old friend, Brett. We grew up together.”

“Oh, right. Good. Uh, I guess I’ll just….” Frank made to leave, one foot already out the door as he muttered, “I don’t wanna bother you…”

“You’re not a bother,” Foggy corrected him a little too quickly. He tried to curb his enthusiasm (with little success) as he added, “In fact, you’re what I would consider the lone perk of being confined to this hospital bed.”

Frank glared at his shoes as he grumbled, “I don’t know if I’d count _my_ company as a perk.”

“Well I _would_ ,” Foggy argued firmly. “So. As my gran used to say, sit a spell. Take a load off and amuse me with wild tales of my fellow recovery wing patients.”

“I’m not much of a storyteller,” Frank admitted, though his feet started to edge towards the chair next to Foggy’s bed.

“That’s fine! You give me the bones of the story, I’ll handle the embellishing. It’s one of my specialties, both personally and professionally.”

“Lawyer, right,” Frank nodded and sat gingerly on the edge of the chair, as if he thought it might try and throw him off at any moment. “Do you do a lot of _embellishing_ in the courtroom?”

“No more than is appropriate, legally and morally,” Foggy replied carefully, shooting Frank a lopsided sort of grin, “Despite what you may have seen on TV, not all defense attorneys are sleazeballs who find ‘the truth’ to be a foreign concept.”

“Mmm. You as rich as all those TV lawyers?”

“Ha. Ha! Rich. Right. Yeah, _no_. Although I could have been. My bleeding heart partner convinced me to drop the gig that would have set us for life, so that we could strike out on our own, defending the innocent and impoverished. Which is all well and good but…I wouldn’t mind being able to consider starting a retirement fund without laughing. Or crying.”

Frank nodded vaguely, and Foggy took that as a cue to continue. “So, if you ever need someone to get you off a murder charge, and you can only afford to pay your lawyer in bananas and rhubarb pie,” Foggy flicked his thumbs towards himself, “I’m your guy.”

Frank chuckled darkly, his gaze sliding away from Foggy as if he was laughing at some sort of in-joke. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he responded softly, with a grim note that sent a shiver down Foggy’s spine. He could hear a reasonable voice in his head, which sounded unnervingly like an unholy Matt/Marci mashup, starting in on a very convincing argument for exactly why Foggy should be running for the hills right now. Because when it came down to it, this guy practically had block letters stamped on his forehead that screamed “Bad News.”

But, ever since Matt pulled a Devil out of his hat, Foggy had become quite proficient at gagging those sensible voices in his head, and he drew on those skills now as he tugged his blankets up and noted mildly, “I get the feeling that you’re not really the care-n-share type.”

“Think so?”

“Just a wild guess.”

Frank huffed a bitter sort of laugh. “Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve talked to…anyone, really. I don’t know. Some days it feels like there’s no point in saying anything.”

“Well,” Foggy replied slowly, “despite my infamous big mouth, which you’re all too familiar with…I’m actually a pretty good listener. I’d guess, with your job, you have to listen to _other_ people’s problems all day.”

Frank nodded a little curtly, eyes skating around the room.

“That must get hard, getting hit in the face with that kind of tragedy, day in and day out.”

“Yeah, it’s like,” the words burst out of Frank suddenly, like Foggy’d unknowingly stepped on a trip wire and set them loose, “it’s like why bother listening, why bother _doing what I do_ , when tomorrow this city’s scum will just send more slabs of meat rolling through our doors, with a foot in the ground already…” Frank cut himself off, a hand scrubbing over his mouth as if he could wipe the words away. “God, I’m…I’m sorry. You don’t wanna hear this shit.”

His muscles were tensing as if he was going to take off, and so Foggy blurted out the first thing that came to mind, “Actually, this is exactly the kind of shit I want to hear.” He saw Frank’s double-take and quickly tried to explain, “I mean, it would be great if things were better and you didn’t _have_ to feel the way you do, but barring such changes, and taking as a given that you do feel these, uh, feelings, then I’d be happy to hear them, I _want_ to hear them…uh, yeah.”

Frank stared at him throughout his bumbling explanation, and then for a solid ten seconds afterward. Foggy had no clue how to interpret the other man’s expression (was he shocked? confused? homicidal?) and the tension in the room drew taut like a bowstring.

It snapped when Frank burst into a laugh. Not laugh _ter_ , but one hearty laugh before he reined himself in. Foggy desperately tried not to think of it as ‘the most beautiful goddamn sound he’d ever heard.’

“You are just… _ridiculous_ ,” Frank finally declared, looking terribly amused.

“I _know_ ,” Foggy lamented. “I still can’t believe people actually _pay_ me for my supposed eloquence. They give me _actual money_ , so that I may speak for them.”

“Well, there’s that too,” Frank agreed, “But what I really mean is, how does someone like you…why do you even _like_ me?”

“Uh….” Foggy squinted at Frank like it was a trick question, “Well, have you looked in a mirror lately?”

“Please,” Frank waved a hand like the mere notion was ridiculous, “I’ve got a busted nose and ‘murder eyes,’ I’m quoting this verbatim from one of my patients.”

“Hmm. I would respectfully disagree, but to bolster my case, I would add that you _are_ my nurse, so we could have a Florence Nightingale scenario going on here.”

“Mm-mm,” Frank shook his head, “I’m too surly for people to get attached to me that fast. And besides, all I’ve done for you is make sure you’re not displaying any obvious signs of infection.”

“Well, there you go, it doesn’t get more romantic than infection-prevention.” 

Frank looked like he might laugh again, but they were interrupted by a commotion outside when a patient bumped into a nurse and sent the tray of food she was carrying flying. Frank straightened in his chair as he was instantly on high alert, his bearing suddenly military in character. It only took a second for him to assess the situation and conclude there was no threat, but by the time he turned back, the moment was gone.

“Um, I think…yeah, I’m going to shut up now, and let you talk,” Foggy decided out loud.

“About my _feelings_?” Frank’s tone made it clear what he thought about _that_ idea.

“Sure,” Foggy shrugged carelessly. “Or…baseball. Electoral politics. Juicy hospital gossip. Whatever you want to talk about, or need to.”

“You know,” Frank began slowly, “when I said you were ridiculous…I think I meant ‘special.’”

Foggy searched Frank’s expression for a moment to make sure he wasn’t misreading anything before he replied earnestly, with a gentle smile, “Thank you.”

Frank ducked his head as if he could physically avoid the gratitude, and it made Foggy smile even more, if a little sadly.

“So tell me, what’s on your mind. Are you a Bolts fan? Please tell me you’re not into the Hellions, because then this cozy little chat will have to end right here and now.”

“Ah…I’m not really into sports.”

“Thank _god_ , because I only know and care about one baseball team, and that’s the sum of it. So, gossip then? Tell me, is working in a hospital as dramatic as it seems in _Grey’s Anatomy_?”

The way Frank told it, it certainly was not – significantly fewer affairs going on, and not nearly as much dramatic resuscitation. Mostly, there was a lot of humdrum routine and ordinary people. Or, to break up the tedium, very strange people with inexplicable injuries.

“So it was really shoved up his –?”

“Yup.”

“Oh man. That is not a place a yard flamingo belongs.”

“It’s really not.”

They never actually arrived at the portion of the evening where Frank opened up and talked about his feelings, or whatever the hell was eating away inside him that gave his eyes that haunted look. But Foggy was ok with that, because even if Frank didn’t exactly put his cards on the table, his shell of detached, cool professionalism cracked, just enough for Foggy to get a glimpse inside. It wasn’t pretty, but it was…intense. And Foggy was drawn to it, to _him_. Despite his best efforts to not think too deeply about any part of his current situation, he still found himself with the hard, cold realization that there was something about Frank’s dark heart that called to Foggy.

But it was late, and he was still too drugged to feel prepared to start unpacking the discovery that he had an unhealthy taste for dangerous, passionate people. So, he listened and he laughed, and he enjoyed being the center of Frank’s laser-focused attention, which Foggy imagined could probably scare a man to death, if employed differently.

As he wound down a story from his time overseas in Afghanistan, Frank suddenly noticed the time, and he glared at the clock like it was trying to pull one over on him.

“Wow. I’m not sure I’ve talked that much since…” Frank’s shoulders sank for a moment as if a literal weight had descended on them, but he shook it off and continued, “I’m not sure I’ve talked that much in months.”

He clapped his hands on his knees as he heaved himself to his feet. “I’m gonna go, because _you_ need to sleep,” he jabbed a commanding finger in Foggy’s direction. “It’s one of the most important things you can do to heal.”

“Hmm. You should get some sleep too then, I think,” Foggy replied with calculated innocence.

Frank’s eyes were sharp as they flickered over Foggy’s expression. “You, Mr. Nelson, are too smart for your own good.”

“And you, Mr. Castle, are not the first person to have said that to me. Though, the last one who said it was jamming a gun in my face.”

A familiar shadow settled over Frank’s features at those words. “Well, that won’t happen again. I can promise you that.”

“I believe you.” Foggy felt a chill creep up his spine as he realized that he _really did_.

“See you tomorrow,” Frank waved sort of clumsily, as if his hand wasn’t used to moving in such a friendly motion, as he stepped outside, pulling the door mostly shut behind him, leaving just a crack of yellow light streaming in.

“See ya,” Foggy called after him. As his eyes adjusted to the dark and he watched the moonlight peeking in from the tiny window steal across his sheets, he started picking through the last hour’s conversations.

Oddly enough, Frank had seemed most at peace when he was talking about the war and his service – like that _wasn’t_ where whatever trauma he was clearly repressing had happened. But what could be worse than war? It wasn’t as if Frank had been stationed stateside, or behind a desk – he’d been right in the shit, with bullets and bombs and bodies, even if he hadn’t said so outright. Foggy didn’t know what kind of hell Frank had gone through, and if he was honest, he didn’t really _want_ to know about something that horrible, but his imagination provided him with a variety of grisly possibilities nonetheless.

It was those thoughts that kept Foggy awake until the IV delivered another wave of pain medication, and Foggy was swept off into a soft, dreamless slumber.

~~~~~

Hospital food really isn’t as bad as everyone says, was what Foggy was musing the next afternoon as he finished a perfectly tasty lunch, brought to him by a friendly nurse with a sweet smile. Honestly, he could get used to nice people bringing him food that wasn’t ramen or takeout.

“Slow down there, champ, leave some for the rest of the patients.”

Foggy froze, spoon in mouth, as Frank’s long shadow filled his doorway, blocking the stark florescent lights of the hall behind him.

Ok, so, hot guy walking in on Foggy shoveling chocolate pudding down his gullet like they were gonna try and take it away from him – not super great. But, he reasoned, he’d recovered from worse. The first time he’d met Matt, he’d basically drooled all over him and then blurted out that he was attractive, and they’d been friends for almost a decade. So, with that lone data point serving as his confidence, he shoved the remains of his lunch aside and smiled, hoping fervently that he didn’t have lettuce stuck in his teeth, or something equally mortifying.

“Hey, food eaten while in the hospital doesn’t count. That’s just science.”

“You know, I think I missed that article in the American Medical Journal.”

“Journal, schmurnal, I saw this on the Internet, so you know it must be true.”

Frank smiled, a real smile the crinkled the corners of his eyes, as he stepped into the room. “So, how are you feeling?”

“Good.” Foggy’s answering smile turned playful as he added, “Better now that you’re here.”

“Smooth. But clichéd. I give that line…6 out of 10.”

“Only 6? Well, I’ll have to do better.”

“I look forward to it.”

Foggy was looking forward to it too, like, a _lot_ , and he really hoped Frank wasn’t planning on checking his pulse right now, because that would just be embarrassing.

“Well, since I’m here, I should at least _look_ like I’m doing my job….” Frank pulled the stethoscope hanging around his neck up to his ears and rubbed the end against his palm to warm it. Foggy tried not to blanch because _oh my god_ that was definitely worse than just checking his pulse.

“Do you mind…?” Frank trailed off, his hand going to the neck of Foggy’s hospital gown.

“Nope.” Foggy was briefly proud that he managed to get that syllable out without it sounding too strangled, before he was busy trying not to hyperventilate as Frank’s empty hand slipped between the pillows and Foggy’s shoulders. He pressed his hand flat against Foggy’s back, fingers pressing into the expanse of skin not covered by the hospital gown as the hand with the stethoscope slid under the front of his clothes to press against his heart.

Foggy couldn’t be positive, but he was pretty sure the nurse who’d done this yesterday hadn’t gotten _quite_ so close. At this distance, little details of Frank’s features appeared, like the slightest patch of grey visible in the light stubble covering his chin, and a pockmark near his temple. It was as he contemplated how those small things added together to make Frank seem even more beautiful that Foggy realized he was in way too deep.

Frank made a thoughtful noise and slanted a smile in Foggy’s direction. “You nervous?” he asked, eyes dancing like he already knew the answer.

“That is not the, uh, feeling that I am…currently experiencing,” Foggy mumbled, willing his heart to _just stop it already_.

“Hmm. Good,” Frank murmured before sliding the stethoscope even lower, pressing up under Foggy’s ribcage. Foggy wondered if ‘good’ referred to him not being nervous, or the way his heart sounded. Then he decided to stop wondering and start focusing on playing it cool, because Frank was _really close_ , and underneath the antiseptic and other hospital scents, he smelled _really good_ , all musky and masculine, and it was taking every last one of Foggy’s remaining functional brain cells to keep from doing something stupid like leaning into the exposed stretch of his neck and just…breathing him in.

“Well,” Frank leaned back abruptly, pulling the stethoscope out of his ears and putting a healthy step between himself and Foggy, “heart and lungs sound good, so you’re probably not gonna die.”

“Now _that’s_ what I like to hear from my nurses,” Foggy quipped, managing a weak smile.

Frank’s lips quirked up in answer before he cast a regretful glance towards the door. “We’re understaffed today, so I really have to go,” he took a tentative step away, “but maybe I’ll be back around here towards the end of my shift…”

“Oh! Okay. Um, before you go…” Foggy fumbled for his wallet, hoping what he was looking for was still in there. “Would it be… _astonishingly_ pretentious of me to offer you a business card?” He scrunched his nose up in concentration as he managed to extricate a slightly battered slip of card stock from the mess of coupons and receipts stuffed in his ragged wallet.

“Yeah, it would,” Frank confirmed, “but I’ll take one anyway. Like you said, what if I need you to get me off a murder charge?” He smirked down at Foggy, and Foggy wished for not the first time that he could be just a _little_ more sure that Frank was kidding when it came to the whole ‘murder’ thing.

“Exactly. Though… you could use the phone number on it for other reasons…” Foggy shot a hopeful smile up at Frank, who crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, yeah?”

“I mean…” Foggy shrank down into his pillows under the weight of Frank’s unforgiving stare, “speaking literally….you _could_ use it for other purposes….”

“Relax, hot shot, I’m giving you a hard time,” Frank waved a hand airily, finally breaking into a proper smile as he backed towards the door. “I know what to do with an attractive guy’s number.”

And with that _very_ suggestive statement, he was gone. Foggy wondered if Frank could ever maybe leave his room _without_ saying something that threatened to throw him into cardiac arrest.

A little while after he’d recovered from the shock of Frank “Hot n’ Brooding” Castle basically saying that a) Foggy was attractive and b) that he was willing to call him for non-work purposes, his phone dinged with a text from Marci.

_M: So, are you still alive? And more importantly, did you bone the nurse with the cute ass yet?_

Foggy sighed and typed back, _Yes to being alive, no to the boning. But! I did give him my number. And he seemed receptive. So, there’s still hope._

_M: Good luck._

Marci had to say goodbye a moment later, what with her real actual job with paying clients and all. Foggy switched over to bothering Matt via text message, and then Karen when Matt didn’t respond. Karen said something vague about tracking down a lead, and Foggy gave up after deciding he didn’t really want to know what those two were getting themselves into. He seemed to have already found his own share of trouble in the form of an enigmatic nurse, and he hadn’t even left his bed.

He whiled away the rest of the afternoon alternately screwing around on his phone and napping. Despite the ever present threat of boredom lingering above his head, he didn’t mind a break from the paperwork, the phone calls, the motions and interviews and keeping Matt in line and worrying about Matt and patching Matt up and…well. There was a certain _theme_ to the things he didn’t mind having a brief respite from.

As was becoming his habit, Frank appeared just as the mounting tedium was starting to wear Foggy down. He’d been considering going for a rebellious, unsupervised stroll around the wing (hospital gown flapping in the breeze and all, what the hell, he didn’t really have a problem with modesty) when Frank dropped by, looking positively dead on his feet.

“Rough day?” Foggy asked, tone gentle as he spotted the pointer finger of Frank’s hand tapping out a nervous staccato on his thigh.

“I got pulled over to ER earlier,” Frank said by way of explanation. “Like I said before, we’re low on staff. A few hours ago, some kids got rolled in. They’d wandered into the wrong part of town, stumbled upon something going down with the Cartel, from the sound of it. The paramedics brought ‘em here but…almost all DOA. Only pieces left. One’s still kicking but probably not for long, and the one that came out of it the best…it’ll be a miracle if he doesn’t spend the rest of his life eating through a tube.”

Foggy shuddered in a breath, nausea rising in his throat as horrible images of mangled bodies flashed through his mind.

“They brought in the shrinks to counsel the parents,” Frank continued, his tone flat, emotionless. “It was time for my break and I didn’t want to be there and…I ended up here.” Frank looked around, blinking, as if only just realizing where exactly he was.

“You wanna sit down?” Foggy offered tentatively, gingerly – Frank looked like he was on a hairpin trigger, and who could blame him after what he’d just seen.

Frank regarded Foggy and the chair next to his bed like they were extra-terrestrials he was trying to decide whether or not to approach, his weight shifting back and forth as if his brain and his legs were having a disagreement about the proper course of action.

“Wait…” Foggy realized as he caught sight of the wall clock out of the corner of his eye, “you were here, like, eight hours ago…shouldn’t your shift be over?”

Frank looked up at Foggy and his eyes widened like he was noticing him for the first time. Foggy waited patiently for the near minute it took for Frank to finally shake himself and reply, “I’m pulling a double for someone who called in sick, I’ll be off in a few hours.” He straightened his shoulders and stepped more firmly into the room as he noted, “Pretty sharp observation there, for a guy who kept babbling about not having any pants yesterday.”

“Yes, well, they reduced my pain meds by about fourfold since then, so I’m noticeably more lucid now.”

“No kidding,” Frank smirked at him as he braced his arms on the back of the chair next to Foggy’s bed.

“Lucid enough to know you look almost as bad as me. You should go find a couch and get some sleep.”

“ _You_ get some sleep,” Frank retorted grouchily, “ _You’re_ the genius who wandered into a biker bar without a weapon or a plan, and got himself shot for his trouble.”

Foggy thought he should maybe be offended, but instead he found himself snorting a laugh, and then another, and once he started it was kind of hard to stop.

“What’re you laughin’ at?” Frank grumbled, squinting suspiciously.

“It’s just…” Foggy shrugged helplessly, trying to control his laughter, “you’re kind of a dick.”

“And that’s _funny_ to you?” Frank asked, eyebrows pulling together in disbelief.

“Well…yeah.”

“You must be on more morphine than you think…” Frank leaned forward to check Foggy’s IV drip, the movement stretching the fabric across his chest in a way that outlined the muscle there quite pleasantly, giving Foggy a nice view which he enjoyed shamelessly. “Hmm.” Frank pulled back, though not far enough away as to be considered actually outside of Foggy’s personal space. “You’re right. Hardly any drugs.”

“See?” Foggy grinned up at him happily. “It’s just my naturally sunny personality.”

“Well, sunshine, you keep up that positive attitude and you’ll be out of here in no time.”

“Eh…” Foggy made a show of shrugging unconcernedly. “I’m in no real hurry to leave…” He let his eyes flick meaningfully up to Frank’s and held his breath, praying that the dastardly machines hooked up to his heartrate didn’t betray his nerves.

Frank tilted his head a fraction to the side, dark eyes flickering, calculating. “In that case….maybe you’ll get lucky, and me and my dickish personality will drop by and see you when my shift’s over.”

Foggy broke into a huge smile, and he thought he spotted the corner of Frank’s mouth twitch rebelliously upward in response. “I hope so,” he replied, unable to play it cool any longer, but okay with it if it meant Frank kept looking at him like _that_.

With one last glance back, Frank left, and Foggy did everything in his power to not punch the air and whoop. Frank had hardly turned the corner before Foggy was scrambling for his phone and dashing off a text to Marci.

_hot nurse smiled! may visit AFTER HIS SHIFT IS OVER_

_Get some, Foggy Bear_ , was her almost instantaneous reply. And a moment later: _I expect a full report_.

Will do, Foggy promised, choosing not to add his other thought ‘if there’s anything to report.’ God, he really did hope there would be _all kinds of things_ to report. But, he reminded himself, real life generally doesn’t unfold like it does in romcoms (or pornos, if he was being honest with himself and the situation he was in). Therefore, he shouldn’t get his hopes up.

Despite his own wise self-counsel, he found himself glancing a little obsessively over at the doorway as the hours ticked by, to the point where he was staring outright at the passersby, eager to catch a glimpse of long limbs and dark eyes.

Unfortunately, the only person to come into his room that night was a petite blonde nurse with a big smile and a high voice, whom Foggy did his utmost to be cheerful around as she fluffed his pillows and checked his blood pressure, even though a little part of him just wanted to take those fluffy pillows and smother himself. Of _course_ Mr. Hot Enough to Be a Movie Star wasn’t coming. Who was he kidding? Foggy considered himself a strong 5, and a passable 6 on a good day – and shot, unshowered, and still pretty drugged did not qualify as a good day. People like Frank didn’t have late night romantic rendezvous in the recovery wing with people like Foggy.

Part of Foggy tried to convince himself that Frank had looked on the verge of passing out when he’d last seen him, and maybe he’d just sensibly decided to go home and get some sleep. Maybe it had nothing to do with Foggy, and more to do with the exhaustion of pulling a double shift in a crowded ER. And it wasn’t like Frank had said he would come by _definitely_ , he’d just said he _might_. It wasn’t a promise. He probably had just forgotten, it wasn’t like it was personal.

Somehow, that didn’t make Foggy feel any better.

He didn’t even have the heart to complain to Marci about how his fantasies of wild hospital sex had been irrevocably crushed (along with a significant portion of his ego). So, he flicked on the TV, and fell asleep to breaking news about police action near the docks with reports of shots fired, where they found a mess of dead Cartel members, and there was some horrible mention of meat hooks…

Foggy woke the next morning to a series of texts from Karen. He scrolled through them, blinking the sleep out of his eyes as he ascertained that she was fine, and Matt was fine, but those Cartel members he’d heard about on last night’s news were definitely _not_ fine. He winced at one of the articles she’d sent that included an image – he’d really hoped the bit about meat hooks had been a nightmare.

The whole thing made his own personal strife seem small in comparison, and for the rest of the morning, he was able to put it almost entirely out of his mind. Instead, his thoughts kept circling around to how, after what he’d heard the Cartel did to a bunch of innocent kids, maybe they’d got what they deserved, meat hooks and all. He didn’t like those thoughts. In fact, they made him feel positively queasy.  Foggy wasn’t usually a vengeful kind of person and he wondered if maybe Matt was finally rubbing off on him. But maybe it wasn’t Matt, he mused gloomily, maybe it was this city, maybe it was Hell’s Kitchen. He was born and raised there, he’d seen firsthand the kind of horrors it could produce, but he’d always consoled himself that when he grew up, he’d make it better. Well, he was grown up now, and he wasn’t sure he could make it better. Hell, part of the problem was that he wasn’t sure what ‘better’ _was_. Did ‘better’ mean Wilson Fisk behind bars, leaving the criminal underworld going gangbusters, with no semblance of control? Was ‘better’ a dozen Cartel members brutally murdered for their crimes? Foggy didn’t know anymore, and _that_ was what scared him most.

So, all in all, Foggy wasn’t really in the best state of mind when Frank slowly pushed open the door to Foggy’s room, looking like a dog that expected to get kicked.

Foggy wasn’t quite sure how to greet him. He finally settled on a relatively aloof and faintly reproving, “Hello, stranger.”

Frank muttered a “Hey,” in reply, and took a cautious step further into the room, which had the inadvertent effect of pulling his face out of the shadows.

“Holy shit,” Foggy breathed once he saw him properly, jerking forward as far as his IV line would allow and swearing despairingly as the plastic tubing tangled and pulled on his arm, the machines beeping their irritation.

“Hey, hey, careful sunshine,” Frank cautioned, crossing the room in a few long strides and easily disentangling Foggy from the mess of wires.

“ _I_ need to be careful?” Foggy echoed incredulously, not even pausing to be moved by Frank’s casual use of that affectionate nickname, “ _Me_? I may have been shot, but at least no one used my face as a punching bag.”

Frank raised a hand to his cheek, as if it could wipe away the bright purple bruising that was blooming all around his left eye socket.

“You should see the other guys,” he retorted weakly, not bothering to hide a wince when Foggy reached a hand up to gently tilt his chin and get a better look at the extent of the damage.

"Actually, I don't think I want to see the other guys," Foggy replied lightly, hoping the anger searing his insides didn’t come through too much in his voice.

Frank put up with Foggy’s worried inspection for a minute longer before he took Foggy’s hand in both of his own and set it gently down on the bed. “C’mon now,” his lips curled in a shadow of his usual smirk, “who’s the medical professional here?”

“My guess?” Foggy crossed his arms, putting on his best I’m-a-lawyer-don’t-fuck-with-me face, “Not the guy with the fresh shiner.”

Frank shuffled his feet and took a slow step back as he muttered a defeated, “yeah.”

Foggy sighed, frustrated. Frank looked lost and sad and broken, and although his puppy dog eyes weren’t on Matt’s level, they were their own brand of devastating. And, as just about anyone who’d ever met Foggy could testify, he was a pushover when it came to people in need. Foggy wasn’t sure _what_ Frank needed, but whatever it was, it was clear that he needed it a hell of a lot.

“I have to say, Frank,” Foggy began, bringing his tone back to one of studied neutrality, “I didn’t think you’d be darkening my doorstep again…” 

“I’m sorry I didn’t, uh, stop by. Something…came up. I had to go.”

“‘Something’ that gave you that black eye?” Foggy guessed.

“Yeah.”

Foggy waited impatiently to see if Frank was going to say anything more, and when he didn’t, prompted him, “Were you mugged? Did a spaceship crash on your face? Did you get in a bar fight? You seem like the kind of guy who’d get in a bar fight.”

“No, I didn’t. And…is that an insult?”

“I don’t know. Have you gotten into a ton of bar fights?”

“I won’t deny that I’ve gotten in my share of bar fights, but that was _not_ what happened last night. I didn’t ditch you to go beat up a bunch of drunks.”

“No, I bet you reserve that for the weekends.”

Frank huffed a surprised laugh before volleying back, “Hey, a man’s gotta have a hobby.”

Foggy nodded seriously before suggesting, “Have you ever considered taking up knitting?”

They both broke into smiles at the same time, and for a moment, the tension between them evaporated. It settled back over them a moment later, however, like a fog blowing in off the sea and choking up the air, darkening Frank’s expression.

“I didn’t want you to think that I just screwed you over,” Frank explained in a low tone. “I didn’t want you to think that…Well, I didn’t want you to feel like you didn’t matter. It was just…I found something out, and it had to be dealt with immediately.”

“And….you’re not going to tell me what it was.”

“I don’t think it’s something you should hear about, or would want to hear about.”

“Well, that’s not alarming at all.” Foggy scrubbed a hand over his face and tried not to think about phrases like ‘psychopath’ and ‘violent temper’. “When you say that, are we talking about ‘me,’ the guy with a soft heart and gentle nature, or ‘me,’ the lawyer who should probably be kept in the dark about illegal actions.”

“Uh…how’s ‘both’ for an answer?”

“It’s a terrible answer. Lucky I didn’t hear it over the, you know, super loud machines,” Foggy knocked on the plastic casing of the almost silently purring heart monitor.

“Yeah, lucky,” Frank murmured, searching Foggy’s expression like it was an enigma he was trying to puzzle out. Foggy wasn’t sure what about himself could be so difficult to divine.

“Anyway,” Foggy plowed on, “Everything’s fine. I’m here, you’re here, and it’s not like you broke a promise or anything. It’s all cool.” Foggy managed to keep his tone cheerful, despite a lingering feeling of being akin to a dentist appointment that someone had missed on purpose.

“Thanks but, uh…” Frank ran a hand through his short crop of hair before continuing in a burst, “Just for the record, or whatever, I _did_ plan on stopping by. I _wanted_ to.” Frank glanced up at Foggy through dark lashes, and Foggy felt whatever resolve he’d had to keep his distance crumble like a sand castle in a tsunami.

He smiled openly up at Frank as he said with much more authentic cheer, “Well, fortunately for you, I’m not getting released until tomorrow morning, so you still have a chance to…ah…swing by and say hello, or…whatever it was…you were planning on doing…” God, Foggy berated himself internally, where was a biker to shoot you when you needed it.

“That’s good,” Frank nodded like he really meant it. “I thought I blew my chances, what with the disappearing act.”

“No. Nope. Your chances are still very much intact. No blowing has been done…” Foggy snapped his mouth shut with difficulty. _Jesus Christ_ , why the hell did this man want to sign up for _more_ time with Foggy Nelson, the most awkward human alive?

Frank’s consternation faded into amusement, smile crinkling his eyes in a way Foggy thought was probably pretty uncomfortable, considering all the angry swelling going on there.

“You know, you didn’t have to let me off the hook so easily, sunshine.”

“Eh,” Foggy shrugged as expansively as his still-aching shoulder would allow, “I’m a forgiving sort of guy.”

“You must be, to put up with my shit.”

“You may find this hard to believe, but your shit is not the worst I’ve had to put up with.”

“I _do_ find that hard to believe.”

“Oh! Also,” Foggy held up a finger like he was about to point out a key piece of evidence in court, “You have now repeatedly called me ‘sunshine’…”

Frank looked slightly abashed. “Yeah, sorry, it just… Is it too much?”

“No, it’s nice. I like it.” Frank relaxed minutely at that, though his expression was still guarded. “I mean, you sure look like you could use a little sunshine in your life.”

“Oh, that’s _cheesy_ , Nelson.”

“You’re into it, Castle.”

“God help me, I am.” The smile playing around the corners of Frank’s lips was soft, and Foggy got the feeling most people didn’t get to see any side of Frank that wasn’t just his hard edges. He also realized that he really wanted to have the opportunity to see a little _more_ of that softness, up close and personal.

“So… that means you’ll come by later?” he suggested hopefully.

“If you’ll have me,” Frank replied, solemn.

“Oh, I will _definitely_ have you…” The words were ringing in the air before Foggy could process their obvious double entendre. He threw his hands over his face and tried not to moan dramatically or turn bright red.  “You should probably leave now so I can die of embarrassment in peace,” he muttered from between his fingers.

“I’ll go,” Frank agreed with a laugh in his voice, “but I warn you, I _am_ coming back. Soon as my shift’s over, I’ll be here.”

“I am very much looking forward to it.” Foggy peeked out from beneath his fingers to smile, and Frank looked a little thrown, like he wasn’t entirely sure why anyone would be looking forward to his company.

He was halfway out the door when Foggy had a thought. “Oh, Frank?” He turned around, expression shuttering like he expected his invitation to be revoked. “If you can’t make it for some reason, there’s an urgent bar fight you need to attend, or whatever…use the number on that card I gave you? It would give me some peace of mind to know that whoever gave you that black eye didn’t leave your body in a back alley somewhere.”

Frank looked both relieved and guilty as he assured Foggy, “I will. I _promise_.” Foggy was treated to one last shadow of a smile, and then he disappeared into the flurry of medical staff outside.

That left Foggy with the rest of the afternoon and probably part of the evening to sit and stew over every single word they’d exchanged and expression they’d traded. Shit, he should have asked Frank when he got off work, then at least he’d have an inkling of how much time he had before…before…

Foggy flushed a little, just thinking about the many and various implications of their conversation. It hadn’t exactly been straightforward, but there had been some very obvious tension between them, hadn’t there? It wasn’t just in Foggy’s mind that Frank’s gaze was heated, his touches a little too intimate, his words more than just friendly? After all, ‘coming back after his shift was over’ was pretty suggestive, right? It wasn’t out of line to think that maybe they were going to… That he wanted…..

Foggy grabbed one of the pillows stuffed behind him and hugged it close to his chest as doubts creeping in from the back of his mind made themselves known. Because it’s not like they’d actually _said_ what he meant…. He shouldn’t assume… It’s not like coming by after his shift was over _necessarily_ meant…

No. Foggy squared his shoulders, cut off his doubts, and hailed a nurse, because no matter what “coming back” entailed, Foggy was sure as hell going to be showered when he experienced it.

The nurse (a no-nonsense woman named Rosa who Foggy found to be comfortingly maternal) assisted him through the rather laborious steps of showering with a still-pretty-heavily-bandaged bullet wound. After the ordeal was over, he was shuffled back to his room, where he dragged a comb through his hair and rubbed at the faint stubble on his chin. Rosa hadn’t trusted his fine motor skills enough to give him a razor, but luckily, his beard didn’t tend to be particularly thick and it’d be a few more days before he reached the point of being uncomfortable and scratchy – one advantage of having a perpetual baby-face. 

He got a fresh hospital gown which was the same dull shade of blue as the last, and still didn’t quite shut properly in the back, but at least smelled a great deal less like, well, a guy who’d been immobile in a hospital bed for the better part of a week.

By the time he was fresh and clean and ready for whatever events the evening held (events Foggy strongly hoped were _adult_ in nature) it was still mid-afternoon. Foggy collapsed back into the bed with a huff, flicking on the TV and beginning to surf through the channels, resigning himself to the fact that today was going to feel like a very, _very_ long day…

~~~~~

“Well, you look like death warmed over,” Foggy announced cheerily as Frank came into view at 9:38 pm (not that Foggy had been staring at the clock all evening, or anything.)

“Mmm,” Frank cracked a smile that managed to be flirtatious even under layers of exhaustion and bruising. “I do feel a little…steamed.”

“I’m not sure if that was an innuendo or a threat….so, all in all, pretty standard for you.”

“Is that what you think?” Frank crossed his arms and lounged against the doorframe as he replied, tone low and suggestive, “I’m half anger, half sex?”

“Ummm…” Foggy’s brain took a moment to reboot after crashing from the way the word “sex” sounded in Frank’s gravelly voice.

“You think it’s a fifty-fifty shot whether I’m the kinda guy who’s gonna fuck you good, or just fuck you up?”

And, there went any doubts Foggy had about the tenor of their previous conversations, or the intent he spotted in Frank’s eyes. All subtlety had, apparently, been abandoned, and Foggy for one was _thrilled_.

“I think…” Foggy’s voice threatened to crack and he sucked in a deep breath before going on, “I think you shouldn’t be allowed to say things like that where any innocent soul could hear them.”

“Is that your way of showing me the door?”

“No! It’s my way of saying you should probably _close_ that door if you’re gonna keep talking to me like that.”

Frank’s lips turned up in a satisfied smirk as he stepped properly inside and around the door, letting his weight fall back and push it closed with a quiet click.

“So, to confirm…I _didn’t_ have my wires crossed earlier today when I thought you wanted…” Frank waved his hand in a vague gesture whose meaning Foggy could only guess at, but which he hoped indicated ‘have really wild hospital sex.’

A vague, nonsensical double entendre along the lines of ‘you can cross _my_ wires anytime’ floated through Foggy’s mind before he was able to refocus on the present conversation. It really was a struggle to think of anything other than, “Oh my god, oh my _god_ , this is happening, this is HAPPENING.” 

“No, no, I definitely _do_ …want…” Foggy mirrored Frank’s gesture, his hand almost shaking with an intoxicating rush of nerves and desire.

Frank tilted his head, gaze scorching where it dragged pointedly over Foggy’s body.

“I’m kind of a bad guy, you know,” he declared, apropos of nothing Foggy was aware of, “Probably dangerous, even.” Foggy had to work to drag his eyes up from where he had been admiring Frank’s strong, tanned forearms to look him in the eye.

“Uh, yeah, I kinda got that vibe,” he admitted nonchalantly, feeling surprisingly calm about how true that was. What the hell, he figured. After the whole Matt-ordeal, he had to be the city’s expert at dealing with strong, handsome, morally troubled men with questionable decision-making skills and violent tempers.

“And… you’re _not_ worried about that?”

“Well, I probably _should_ be but…nah.”

“ _Nah_?” Frank echoed incredulously.

“Nah. I think I have a type,” Foggy confessed.

“So, even though, if you have _any_ sense at all, I’m probably setting off _dozens_ of red flags...you’re just gonna let me stay?”

Foggy nodded brightly. “Yup.”

“You know, you should take better care of yourself, sunshine. You deserve nice things, and nice people.” But even as Frank said that, he snaked a hand back to the door and flipped the lock shut. Foggy’s stomach did excited somersaults at the implications of _that_ , and he tried not to look too painfully desperate.

“ _You_ are a nice thing,” Foggy countered. “And I’d say you’re a nice person, but I would guess you’d disagree, and an argument isn’t exactly what I’m looking for right now.”

“You guess right, I would disagree.” Frank looked mildly amused as he advanced slowly towards Foggy’s bed, that is, until his eyes flickered over to the muted TV, still tuned to the news. 

Foggy had forgot the thing was even playing, eyes far too busy devouring Frank to notice the images of polished anchorpeople and news footage flashing in the background. He scrambled for the remote but it was too late, Frank’s face had hardened into an unreadable expression and he’d stopped, stock still a few feet from Foggy’s bedside.

“You know,” Frank muttered, addressing the linoleum, “there were more of them today.”

Foggy’s stomach twisted with the beginnings of dread as he waited for Frank to elaborate, which he did after a long, quiet minute.

“More innocents. Gunned down. A man and his wife. They ran a bodega in the Irish’s territory, and when they couldn’t pay their protection fee…”

“That’s horrible.” Foggy rubbed his temple, wishing he didn’t live in a city where innocent people were subjected to that kind of brutality on a daily basis. “I guess the Irish are probably extra skittish considering how their numbers are being cut down by these gunmen. Makes ‘em trigger happy.”

“You think…you think that the gunmen _caused_ this?” Frank looked floored, and a touch enraged. “You think that whoever these people are who are taking on the gangs, that they’re somehow making it _worse_? By trying to get rid of these murdering, shitbag, bastard criminals, that they’re to _blame_?”

“Violence begets violence,” Foggy answered simply, meeting Frank’s furious gaze calmly. 

Frank blinked, and Foggy really couldn’t guess what was happening behind those dark eyes. “You know, you never really gave me an answer the other day,” Frank pointed out coldly, “when I asked you what you thought about this, about them.”

Foggy’s hands worried at the hem of the scratchy hospital sheets. Even having spent far too many hours with only TV pundits and his own thoughts as company, he still hadn’t settled his heart on where he felt about the whole mess. Before vigilantes became the new norm in Hell’s Kitchen, it would have been so much easier. But now? He’d lived too long in shades of grey to think that there was any sort of black and white answer to that question.

“Those Irish, those _people_ …” Foggy began cautiously, gently. “They were brothers and sons and fathers too. Maybe their deaths saved lives, but they broke their families’ hearts too.”

Frank nodded soberly, his shoulders doing something complicated as he seemed to square them and deflate at the same time. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe whoever did it is no better than the scum he put down.”

“He?” Foggy’s legal instincts latched on to the unusual pronoun, “You think _one_ guy could do all that?”

Frank shrugged, the move performed with a practiced indifference. “Maybe. If he was…determined enough. If he had enough rage inside him.” Frank peered curiously at Foggy’s expression, like he was having trouble deciphering it. “Does that freak you out? That one person could have that much hate?”

“I mean, kinda yeah,” Foggy conceded. “But mostly it makes me… sad. What could have happened to this guy that would make him…” Foggy had to take a deep breath, just the vaguest idea making his heart ache.  He thought about Matt, and what he’d endured, and how that pain had moved him to unleash his violence on the city’s criminals. When he thought about it, just how crazy was it to believe that one man could have done all of this? It would hardly be the first time a guy with a chip on his shoulder had taken it upon himself to clean up the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. Maybe if Matt had lost one more person, maybe if he hadn’t found Foggy and Karen to ground him…maybe he’d be the one indiscriminately gunning down criminals. It was all Foggy could do not to let his voice shake as he replied, “Anyone who could do _that_ would have to be in so much pain…I can’t actually comprehend it.”

Foggy couldn’t bring himself to look up at Frank until he heard the note of raw hope in his voice as he responded, “So, the man who killed all those…all those criminals. Could you forgive him? For what he’s done?”

Foggy’s hand reached out almost unconsciously to take Frank’s, wrapping around his long fingers and tugging him closer to the bed.

He considered his words thoroughly before he responded, “I don’t know if it would be my place to forgive him but…for whatever it would mean…I think I could.”

Frank surged forward and kissed him, hard, rough, and perfect. He pulled back far too soon, and Foggy almost whined as he jolted after him in an attempt to follow. Frank straightened up, looking a little shocked and a little out of breath – it was, in Foggy’s opinion, a very good look.

Foggy grinned up at Frank, feeling a little loopy and not caring at all, his head still spinning from the dramatic tone shift, but pleasantly so. “That was…nice, I think. You should probably come back down here so I can be sure, though.”

Frank laughed, the sound only marginally brittle as he braced his arms on either side of Foggy and leaned in close. “This is a bad idea for a lot of reasons.”

“Yeah, well, I'm the king of bad ideas. No, actually, that's my best friend’s title. So, I'm like the VP of bad ideas.”

“Well, Mr. VP, you’re certainly gonna earn that title tonight.” And with that, Frank levered himself up, swinging a leg over Foggy and straddling him in one graceful movement. He kept an inch or so between their bodies, his torso tantalizingly close to Foggy’s, as his mouth drifted to hover along his neck, before finally descending on his throat.

Foggy bit back a moan, mindful of the nurses and doctors and patients only a few feet and a thin plaster wall away, but it was a close thing. Frank’s mouth felt as good as it looked, and Foggy’d been fantasizing about that mouth since about two seconds after he saw it.

He was _really_ enjoying the whole experience, slipping his good hand up Frank’s side and fanning it across his stomach, getting a taste of the supremely muscled abdomen hidden underneath those loose scrubs, when he made the unfortunate mistake of trying to move his wounded arm at more than an inch a minute, and was rewarded with a scalding pain shooting through his shoulder. He hissed at the sharp, icy-hot burn, numbed by the pills he’d been given a couple of hours ago, but not enough. 

Frank reared back immediately, a flash of professional concern crossing his face as he gently adjusted the angle of Foggy’s arm where it rested in its sling.

“Gonna have to watch that arm, sunshine,” he cautioned.

“Eh, it’s mostly fine. It only hurts if I move, or breathe.”

“Oh, is that all?”

“Yeah. Besides,” Foggy shot a wicked grin up at Frank, “I was kinda hoping you’d be doing most of the work tonight.”

Frank’s eyes flashed with a predatory look that went straight to Foggy’s dick, and then he had a hand in Foggy’s hair and was dragging their mouths together. Foggy deepened the kiss with enthusiasm, opening his mouth and inviting Frank inside. Foggy took Frank’s face in hand, tilting it to just the right angle (because while Foggy may occasionally be an awkward flirt, he was the best damn kisser in Manhattan and he was about to _prove_ it).

He only pulled away when oxygen became a more urgent need than exploring every corner of Frank’s mouth (and it was a damn close contest.) He was gratified to see that Frank was breathing hard too, pupils blown and mouth looking deliciously red and wet.

“What d’you want, gorgeous?” Frank murmured, the hand in Foggy’s hair moving to smooth his wavy locks back in a surprisingly tender gesture. “What do you want me to do?”

“Well.” Foggy took a deep breath and gathered his scattered thoughts. “I’m gonna be blunt, buddy. I’d love it if you fucked me. But, if you wanna do something else, I’m down, assuming it’s not too kinky.”

Frank didn’t seem at all thrown or embarrassed by Foggy’s candidness, in fact, it seemed to relax him a bit. He replied in a tone Foggy thought he might have to classify as ‘saucy,’ though he’d never say that to Frank’s face, “I wouldn’t worry about that, I think I’m pretty vanilla, by most standards.”

“That’s alright, vanilla is a classic flavor. Much maligned by folks who don’t know better, but fear not, I’m an educated man.”

Frank tilted his head in amused contemplation of Foggy’s features. “It’s gonna take some real work to shut you up, isn’t it?”

“Oh, work like you wouldn’t _believe_.”

“I’m always up for a challenge.” As he said that, he reached into the deep pockets of his scrubs and pulled out –

“ _What_ the… _you_ …” Foggy gaped at what Frank had in his hands. “You little _shit_ …you say you’re so ‘vanilla’ but you just _happen_ to have condoms and lube on you at all times?”

“Not _all_ times, just this time,” Frank insisted, setting the supplies on Foggy’s bedside table.

“Well then, you must have been pretty sure you were gonna get some tonight to be so prepared.”

“Not sure just…hopeful,” Frank’s tongue stumbled over that last word, like it was in a foreign language.

“Hmmm.” Foggy squinted up at him. “How long exactly had you been hoping you were gonna get lucky…”

“Well…” Frank’s eyes couldn’t quite meet Foggy’s as he answered, “For long enough to push some paperwork around and make sure you weren’t transferred out of a private room.”

“You kinky fucker!” Foggy whacked Frank’s bicep (which: ow, Jesus, he’d thought Matt was the only person outside the Avengers and WWE with muscles like that). “Not that I’m complaining, mind you! And, it kind of fits with what I’ve seen of your personality. You seem like a ‘don’t take a piss without a plan’ type.”

“Listen, wise guy, I just wanted to be able to talk to you in some peace, alright? My mind wasn’t that far in the gutter.”

“Right, right, you’re a perfect gentleman.” Foggy tried not to snicker up at Frank’s frustrated expression. “Now that we’ve established that, will you get on with it and fuck me already?”

 _That_ set the mood back on track. Frank shifted his weight meaningfully, hips pressing down against Foggy’s with not nearly enough friction to be satisfying. “Impatient, aren’t we?”

“Uh, yeah,” Foggy agreed readily. “You’re _really_ hot, if you weren’t aware. And also, I’m a little worried that the longer we take, the higher the likelihood is that one of your colleagues wanders in here and catches us in flagrante.”

“That’s why I locked the door, sunshine, and besides, it’s a skeleton crew at night, especially with half the staff working double duty in the ER to deal with the influx of gang violence…” Frank shook his head abruptly, like his was forcibly cutting off a line of thought before he continued, “But we _do_ still have to be quiet.”

“That…may be a problem.”

Frank grinned, a sharkish smile that should _not_ have been as attractive as it was. “You gonna need something to bite down on?”

“…maybe,” Foggy admitted.

Frank tugged lightly on one of the pillows behind Foggy’s head. “I’ve got you covered.”

Foggy reached out to the bedstand, grabbed the lube, and slapped it into Frank’s palm. “You really do, big guy.”

Frank grinned as he tore open a packet of lube, and Foggy savored the sight, because Jesus, this really was a fantasy come to life.

Frank reached his free hand down to tug the sheets out of the way, before sliding his hand up Foggy’s thigh, under the thin fabric of his clothes.

“That is one nice thing about these shitty hospital gowns…” Foggy noted, waggling his eyebrows suggestively, “… _easy access_.”

“Easy acc– ?” Frank realized what Foggy meant and burst into laughter which he quickly tried to suppress, though he couldn’t quite get rid of a persistent smile. “ _Christ_ , sunshine.”

“Hey, you’re not the only one here with a dirty mind.”

“Clearly not,” Frank murmured, leaning back down to kiss a line down Foggy’s neck, biting just this side of too rough at the juncture of his throat and shoulder.

Unlike his industrious mouth, Frank’s first touch between Foggy’s legs was tentative, and so was his second, his slick fingers just brushing over Foggy’s hole.

“It’s been a while,” he admitted in a gruff whisper when Foggy raised a questioning eyebrow in his direction.

“You need a refresher course? Maybe a diagram?”

“Don’t patronize me, hot shot,” Frank warned, with little real heat in his voice.

“Don’t worry, I’m a very good teacher,” Foggy promised.

“I’ll be you are,” Frank muttered, before slipping a finger in to the first knuckle.

“Oh! Well. There. I think you’re getting the hang of it,” Foggy gasped as Frank slid his finger gently in and out, growing more certain with every second.

“Smart ass,” Frank muttered.

“ _Great_ ass,” Foggy corrected him.

“No argument there,” Frank agreed, punctuating his point with a drag of his finger that had Foggy muffling a swear in the pillow so helpfully placed next to his head.

Foggy sucked in a deep breath and settled back, willing himself to relax. He realized that he now had a prime opportunity to stare at Frank openly and with good reason, and quickly took advantage of it. He let his eyes trail from Frank’s short cropped hair down to his severe brow, furrowed in concentration as he worked Foggy open. He looked into Frank’s dark eyes, and felt his heart catch in his throat when their gaze locked and neither of them looked away. Frank had eyes that dug deep, that got their claws in and never let go, the kind of eyes that could haunt dreams and nightmares alike.

Frank’s nose, on the other hand, looked like a whole football team had taken turns breaking it. Foggy found it utterly charming, to the point where he couldn’t stop himself from leaning forward and pressing a quick kiss to the bridge of it. Frank scrunched up his nose in response, and it was a truly delightful sight. Foggy wanted to take a picture and frame it.

“I like your nose,” Foggy explained, when Frank stared askance at him, “It’s cute.”

“I hate to break it to you, but there is no part of me that’s _cute_.”

“You really don’t want to get into an argument with me about this, buddy, I’m a lawyer and I could run circles around youuuu _nggghhhh_ …” Foggy’s sure to be quite stunning argument was cut off when Frank pressed his fingers deep inside Foggy, hitting his prostate and sending sparks up behind his eyes.

“Little lost for words there, counselor?” Frank smirked, pleased.

“You…play dirty…” Foggy panted, nipping at Frank’s jaw in retaliation.

“Is there any other way to play?”

Foggy conceded that point wordlessly, since speaking was currently pretty low on his list of priorities. Much higher were such things as, “Make him do that again,” and “Make him do that again _with his dick_.”

Frank seemed to read his mind, or was just as ready to get the show on the road as Foggy was, because in the next moment he was shucking off his pants and boxers and tossing them mindlessly to the ground, and _hello_.

Foggy’s admiration of Frank’s body in all its glory was impeded by the sudden appearance of hesitance on Frank’s part when it came to stripping off his shirt. Foggy scoffed lightly, reaching out to help tug it off as best as he could one-handed. As the dark blue shirt sailed over the side of the bed to join Frank’s pants, Foggy caught sight of a few jagged scars scattered across Frank’s chest. From his unfortunately empirical knowledge, he thought they looked like mostly bullet wounds, one was probably a knife, and one was something that Foggy didn’t recognize but imagined was very painful. With a little hum, he leaned forward to press a kiss to the nearest knot of healed-over scar tissue. When he fell back, he caught sight of Frank’s expression and was gratified to see his eyes were wide with wonder. His lips curled up in the softest smile Foggy had ever seen grace his features, and there was something about the obvious rarity of the expression that made his heart twinge.

“So…” Foggy knocked his knees playfully against Frank’s hips, dispensing with the melancholy that seemed to constantly be threatening to drown them both, “We gonna do this?”

Frank made an affirmative noise, and the hand that wasn’t still stretching Foggy open reached to the side table to snag a condom. Foggy watched with hungry eyes as he rolled it on, and he spread his legs wide in invitation.

“You ready, sunshine?” Frank asked, voice low and husky as his free hand stroked up and down Foggy’s side.

“Abso-fucking-loutely,” Foggy confirmed with great enthusiasm, before he realized one last thing.

“Wait!” Foggy held up a hand like he was directing traffic and Frank jerked to a halt, something akin to panic flashing in his eyes. “Sorry!” Foggy added quickly, “It’s just…” he picked with great chagrin at the hem of the awful hospital gown he was still wearing, “D’you think you could get me out of this thing? I don’t think this polyester blend has any place in tonight’s activities.”

Frank visibly relaxed, and moved to help extricate Foggy from the last layer of fabric separating their bodies. “Jesus, sunshine,” he murmured as he dragged the gown gently over Foggy’ injured arm, “You almost gave me heart failure.”

“Well, I’d apologize, but it seems only fair, considering how many times you nearly threw me into cardiac arrest when you were flirting with me.”

“Sorry about that,” Frank said, sounding not sorry in the slightest. “Let me make it up to you,” he leered, and Foggy laughed at the glaring innuendo.

“Oh, _please_ do,” he teased right back, and Frank got a look in his eye that told Foggy that that was _exactly_ what he was going to do.

Frank dove forward, catching Foggy’s mouth in a scorching kiss, and grabbed Foggy’s thighs in the same movement, sliding home in one smooth stroke that had Foggy gasping against his mouth.

 _Jesus_ , he thought a little wildly, I should get shot more often.

Frank hitched Foggy’s legs up above his hips easily, moving Foggy gently as he adjusted to the stretch, paying close mind to his injured arm.

Frank’s grip was tight but still cautious, nothing near bruising, and his expression as he peered into Foggy’s eyes was borderline worried. That simply wouldn’t do.

“Although I may look soft and sweet, I won’t break,” Foggy assured him merrily, if a bit breathlessly.

“You promise?” Frank shot back, only half-joking.

Foggy reached up to smooth a thumb over the concerned twist of his mouth, and promised him, “I’ll be fine. I know that you’ll take care of me.”

A complicated tangle of emotions battled across Frank’s features, before being wiped neatly away as he furrowed his brow in concentration and started fucking Foggy the way he’d really hoped a heavily muscled, 6 foot plus man with a chip on his shoulder and darkness in his eyes would fuck him – i.e. hard, fast, and with reckless abandon. Frank did not disappoint.

Foggy curled his ankles more securely behind Frank’s back and wrapped his functional arm around his neck, but mostly, sat back and enjoyed the ride. And man, it was a _good_ ride. 10/10 would visit again, this was better than any goddamn roller coaster, Disney World could fuck right off. And although that metaphor got a little carried away in his head, he didn’t give a shit because _fuck_ this was good. This was what he wanted, what he _needed_ , this was washing away days of feeling helpless and alone. For the first time, he wasn’t cycling endlessly back to that moment where it all went to shit, the pain and the overwhelming _fear_ of being shot and surrounded by angry, violent criminals, of being sure that no one could save him, no one could stop all these people with their guns, no one could make a dent in this kind of rampant hell, so why did _he_ think he could make a difference? That was all knocked right out of his mind, and _good riddance_ , because this was a moment to _live in_.

Foggy’d never before had the occasion to participate in life-affirming sex, but if this was what it was usually like, he could definitely get into it.

After a little while, with Frank was hitting just the right spot and _god yes right there_ , Foggy apparently reached the point of too-much-noise-for-secret-illicit-hospital-sex, because Frank leaned down and crushed their mouths together, only pulling back for a moment to whisper against Foggy’s spit-slick lips, “Thinking you should maybe bite something now, sunshine, unless you want to alert the neighbors.”

“Right, right,” Foggy muttered, grabbing blindly for the pillow and jamming it in his mouth, possibly a little too eagerly. In fact, he didn’t really mind a bit of forced restraint during sex, if he was telling the truth, but he wasn’t sure he needed Frank to know that.

The makeshift gag was almost immediately an improvement, because now he could shelve all thoughts of keep-quiet-keep-quiet-keep-quiet and just…let go.

“ _Christ_ ,” Frank panted fervently, “you make that look way hotter than it should be, sunshine.”

If Foggy had been capable of speaking, he would have given Frank a whole litany of all the things _he_ did that were way hotter than they should be. As it was, he just sort of moaned, and pulled on Frank’s shoulders.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve got you,” Frank murmured as he pulled Foggy even closer, shifting his angle and pounding into him mercilessly.

Foggy rutted weakly against Frank, not having the position or the strength to find the friction he wanted, and for not the first time that night, Frank seemed to know what he needed without having to speak.

Frank’s big calloused hand (Jesus, those _hands_ , Foggy probably wouldn’t fantasize about anything else, ever) closed around Foggy’s cock and jerked him roughly in time to match his thrusts, and Foggy came with almost ridiculous speed after that.

Frank kept slamming into him, rhythm growing shaky and sweat beading on his forehead. Foggy squeezed his legs tightly around Frank’s torso, and reached up to scratch a hand through the short hair at the base of his skull. Frank came with a shudder, muffling his groan against Foggy’s shoulder.

With a satisfied huff, Foggy slumped back against the pillows, eyes drifting up to the ceiling which swam slightly in his vision. Frank was frozen above him, elbows locked and trembling almost invisibly with the effort of holding his body up.

“C’mere,” Foggy slurred, wrapping his good arm up around Frank’s shoulders and tugging him down towards his chest. Frank followed slowly, laying himself gently along Foggy’s good side before collapsing properly, breath leaving him in a rush.

The condom was disposed of, and the now kind of gross pillow Foggy’d been biting was tossed over the edge to join their discarded clothing. They’d have to deal with it all eventually, but not just yet. For now, Foggy was enjoying a lovely afterglow, and Frank’s warm breath still coming in pants against his ear.

Foggy was big on cuddling, and had little shame about it. But, he also had few illusions that Frank would share that same desire, or that he would care to stay longer than was typically polite for a spur of the moment hookup. Though, this wasn’t _that_ spur of the moment, was it? Perhaps that explained why Frank seemed in no hurry to vacate Foggy’s bed.

Since he didn’t know how much longer he’d be allowed the privilege of having Frank naked and within easy reach, Foggy availed himself of their intimate proximity. He ran his hand along Frank’s pleasantly defined arm and back up his chest, pausing when he reached Frank’s neck and found it bereft of the dog tags he’d been wearing just a few days before. Though his curiosity was piqued, he chose not to question it, somehow figuring that pointing out a lack of significant jewelry most likely wasn’t a great opener for post-coital conversation.

Instead, he let his hand continue its wandering, moving up to cup Frank’s jaw in a gesture that was probably too sentimental for their situation, but Foggy couldn’t bring himself to care. Frank didn’t seem to mind either, leaning into the touch almost subconsciously, like he was just searching out base animal warmth. But then he nuzzled Foggy’s palm, and it didn’t feel base at all, it felt like something _more_ than either of them was prepared to deal with.

There was a loud crack from the road outside and below, the noise ricocheting off the hospital’s brick walls and magnifying. Frank’s eyes flew open and he bolted upright, looking ready to leap out of the bed, and Foggy instinctively threw up his hands like he was trying to calm a spooked horse.

“Easy, buddy,” Foggy murmured, soothing, “it was just a car backfiring!” After another tense moment his words seemed to get through, pacifying Frank as he settled back down, looking less like he was going to make a run for it as his hand clenched fiercely at the bed’s railing.

“Right,” Frank muttered under his breath, eyes still skittering between the window and the door, “Of course. Sorry.”  He shook his head in a gesture Foggy was coming to recognize as a sign that he was trying to literally force his thoughts into order. “I just got a little confused for a moment.” He glanced up at Foggy from under his lashes and latched on a crooked grin as he added, “I guess the sex was a little more mind-blowing than I bargained for.”

No one would mistake Frank’s smile for genuine, but Foggy let it pass. “What can I say?” he grinned back, “Being shot and confined to a hospital bed doesn’t slow me down.”

“No kidding.” Frank’s hand seemed to reach of its own accord towards Foggy, detouring at the last moment to sink into the pillow beside his head.

“I don’t think I’ll ever look at these pillows the same way again,” Frank commented vaguely. “Or these sheets,” he added after a moment, “Or this bed.” He glanced once more around the room before his gaze settled back on Foggy. “I guess it doesn’t really matter anymore,” he murmured, almost like an afterthought.

Foggy shot him a curious look, and felt a cold pit start to form in his stomach. “Why do I suddenly get the feeling that this is a last-night-on-earth sort of situation?”

Frank snorted a humorless laugh. “I didn't think about it that way but...yeah. That's kinda accurate.”

Foggy’s heart skipped a beat and his hand shot out to grip Frank’s wrist. “Frank, you're not...you're not going to...there are people who can help—”

“No, gorgeous,” Frank cut him off, his free hand fluttering near Foggy’s as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to take hold of it. “I'm not going to kill myself.”

Frank _seemed_ to be telling the truth, and Foggy let himself breathe again. “Then why...?”

“I’m leaving the hospital,” Frank explained. “I’ve done what I needed to do here.”

Yeah, you did _me_ , Foggy’s brain supplied unhelpfully. “So, what, you wanted to go out with a bang?” Foggy tried to say the words without sounding bitter, because he wasn’t, he _wasn’t_.

“That is my style,” Frank agreed coolly, a hard edge to his voice as he heaved himself out of the bed, and began to retrieve his clothes from the pile on the floor.

Feeling whatever peace they’d so briefly found with each other slipping away, Foggy hastily sat up, leaning towards Frank as he said, “You know, if this is your last day here, I’m really flattered that you chose to spend it with me.”

A grin flitted along the edges of Frank’s lips before disappearing as he replied, “Yeah, well, you deserve a lot better than a sleazy fuck in your goddamn sickbed.”

“It wasn’t _sleazy_ ,” Foggy objected lightly, “it was…kinky?”

Frank huffed a laugh, pulling his shirt back over his head, and Foggy barreled on, “Yes, it was definitely kinky. Like, in a very hot way. In a ‘gee, I’ve always had a naughty nurse fantasy and now I got to live it!’”

“Well, glad I could make your dreams come true, sunshine.” Frank graced him with a small smile, and Foggy wished his heart didn’t want to leap out of his chest at the sight.

“Will I ever see you again?” The words had escaped Foggy’s mouth before he could shove them to the back of his mind where they belonged, but Frank hardly even seemed to take notice, just drifting forward until he was back in Foggy’s personal space.

Frank didn't answer the question, instead running a hand along Foggy’s cheek, into his hair, tucking an errant strand behind his ear with something approaching reverence. "I never thought I would ever touch anything _good_ again..." he murmured, voice just a low, rugged whisper. His eyes were focused, but he still seemed far away, his hand hovering millimeters away from Foggy’s skin like there was something keeping them apart.

Finally, his fingers brushed one last feather-light touch along Foggy’s cheek and then they were gone, and he was starting to drift away. For the second time that night, Foggy’s hand acted of its own volition, shooting out to fist in the front of Frank’s scrubs, like he had a hope in hell of keeping him there if he wanted to leave.

"Don't go," he stated clearly, more a directive than a request, fighting to keep the desperation clawing up his throat from creeping into his tone.

"I have to,” Frank replied, voice frighteningly hollow.

"No, you really don't," Foggy countered stubbornly.

"C'mon, let me go.” Frank reached up and took his hand, grip gentle but firm. “Don't make me turn up your meds,” he warned when Foggy didn’t budge.

Foggy spared a glance for the IV machine he was still hooked up to, though he’d been taken off the intravenous pain medication earlier that day. It was only delivering a saline solution right now, but Foggy wouldn’t bet against Frank being able to change that and knock him out in under a minute with a few cc’s of morphine…if he was so inclined.

"You wouldn't,” he finally decided after a minute’s consideration, wishing he felt more confident in that conclusion. Despite his words, Foggy’s grip loosened on Frank’s shirtfront and Frank used the lapse to break free, putting a wide step between them.

"I would though,” Frank insisted, voice dipping into a lower, darker register. “I told you before, I'm not a good guy."

Their eyes locked fiercely over the linoleum as Foggy maintained, "You are with _me_."

Frank held Foggy’s gaze for a few more moments before breaking away, eyes dropping to the floor as he knelt and picked up Foggy’s discarded hospital gown. He stood, shaking it out and laying it with care along the edge of Foggy’s bed as he replied, "That's why I have to go."

"That doesn’t make any _sense_ , Frank. You’re…you're _scaring_ me," Foggy admitted, though he didn’t explain how it wasn’t that he was scared _of_ Frank but _for_ Frank.

"Yet another reason for me to go."

Foggy’s good hand balled up in a fist as he reined in his frustration. He knew he had no real right to demand answers and explanations from Frank, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to do so with every fiber of his being.

“Couldn’t you just…tell me _why_?” he implored Frank. “Why me, why now, why do you have to go…you said I deserved better. Doesn’t that mean I deserve some answers?”

That was a low blow and Foggy knew it, but he also recognized a losing battle when he was in one, and when the time had come for last resorts.

“You do, sunshine,” Frank agreed, “you really, really do.”  For a moment, Foggy thought he might have gotten through, but then Frank was turning away and stepping to the door, unlocking it and swinging it roughly open.

“Be happy, alright?” Frank muttered over his shoulder, softness creeping around the edges of his cold voice. “Don’t let anyone try and put out your light.”

“ _Frank_ –”

“Goodbye."

And like so many times before, Frank disappeared from Foggy’s doorway, only now Foggy wasn’t left with hope for tomorrow but a sinking feeling that he would never lay eyes on Frank again.

It only took a few seconds of indecision for Foggy to conclude _the hell with it_ , and begin to struggle back into his hospital gown, with half-baked plans of following Frank and somehow wringing more satisfying answers out of him. Unfortunately, getting into the gown was rather more difficult than getting out, and his progress was further impeded by the IV he was still hooked up to. He eventually managed to wrangle his clothes back on and take hold of the IV stand, fully prepared to journey out into the recovery wing and the great unknown – but he’d barely taken a step towards the door when the little blonde nurse who’d brought him his food the other day appeared in his path.

“Oh! Mr. Nelson, what are you doing out of bed?” She chided him, marching forward and trying to shoo him back.

“I just…wanted to talk to Frank,” Foggy answered uncertainly, not having thought very far ahead in his plan past ‘go.’

The nurse’s eyes widened and she reached out to take Foggy’s arm, looking concerned. “Did he _do_ something?”

“What? No!” Foggy tilted away from her anxious hands, now fluttering around his shoulders. “No, of course not, he didn’t do anything, not a single thing at all, why…why would you ask that?” Foggy finally managed to put a stopper in the nervous babble pouring out of his mouth.

“Well, everyone here’s been worried about him ever since the horrible stuff that happened to him and his family…” The nurse shook her head pityingly, and Foggy felt the dread that had been gathering in his stomach grow exponentially. “Even after he got out of the coma, none of us thought he’d want to come back to work…”

“ _Coma_?” Foggy sputtered, trying not to physically reel at the news.

The nurse winced sympathetically. “Yeah, he was out for a long time…and then he finally came to, just to find out his wife and kids were, well…passed on.”

Foggy was very glad he hadn’t ventured far from the bed, because he really, _really_ needed to sit down, right now.

He stared at the bland grey floor and pulled in a shaky breath, settling his features into an open, you-can-trust-me kind of expression before he looked up and asked evenly, “Could you tell me more about what happened?”

~~~~~

About a half an hour later, Foggy lay in bed, blinking unseeingly up at the ceiling. His uninjured hand clutched the sheets, like holding on to that anchor could stop his mind from spinning off into a hundred directions, each darker and bloodier than the last.  

News reports and suspicious absences and wounds were clicking together in a way that was nauseatingly familiar to Foggy. Waves of alternating fatigue and anger washed over him, pinning him to the mattress, making his limbs feel too heavy to move. His muscles twitched, trying to break free even as he struggled to summon the energy to breathe.

There was nothing he could do, there was nothing he could do, there was _just nothing he could do_ –

But there was someone he could talk to.

Foggy hit Matt’s number on his speed dial and tried not to notice how his hands were shaking.

“Foggy?” Matt’s voice sounded disoriented, from what Foggy could only hope was sleep and not another head injury. “What time is it?”

“Uh, late. I just. I needed to…” Foggy didn’t know what to say, his words were slowly deserting him and he was worried that soon there wouldn’t be anything left that he _could_ say.

“Hey, buddy, what’s wrong?” Matt asked, tone instantly switching from sleepy to concerned.

“Do you have time to talk, right now?”

“Of course, Foggy. Are you alright?”

“I…” Foggy couldn’t say it, couldn’t assure Matt that he was fine, because he didn’t have the strength to tell that lie. Instead, he asked him the question that was burning a hole in his chest: “What do you do, when you can’t save someone?”

**Author's Note:**

> Why is everything sad. Hold me. Also, leave a comment so we can be sad together! <333  
> ETA: now, with fantastic [fanart by Iraya!](http://iraya.tumblr.com/post/149204576044)


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